500 words a day on whatever I want

Snow Makes You Smarter

“Snow Makes You Smarter” is my name for the idea that white people are born with more intelligence than blacks because they come from a long line of people who lived through thousands of unforgiving winters in the cold, cruel north. Unlike blacks, who lived in Africa where you can sit under a tree all day and eat bananas. Or something. The idea goes back to at least Madison Grant in 1916.

Defenders point out all the wonderful inventions of white people and how screwed up Africa is. They point to IQ tests.

IQ and winter temperatures:

I found out that:

IQ = 100 – C

Where IQ is a country’s average IQ and C is the mean January temperate in Celsius at its capital.

I tried it on 35 capital cities where the race of most people has not changed in over 10,000 years. For two-thirds of them I got to within 5 points.

Here, from coldest to hottest (the numbers for each city are: C, 100 – C and IQ):

Correlation is not cause: The proper way to do this is to see if there is a strong statistical correlation with a large sample. But even that would not prove cause. There might be some third factor at play – like that IQ tests are written by northerners.

IQ tests cannot be trusted:

Black Africa has an average IQ of 70. Contrary to what you see on television, Africa is not some coast-to-coast refugee camp. It cannot be: it supports a billion people.

Civilization arose mostly in Places of Very Little Snow, like Egypt, the Middle East, Central America and India.

Eskimos do not rule the world: people live in far crueler places than Oxford, England, like Patagonia, Lapland, Siberia, Darfur and the deserts of Australia. Yet no one who makes this argument expects these people to be particularly bright. Why is that?

Mankind arose in Africa. Time and time again since the 1920s those who believed Snow Makes You Smarter have been proved wrong about different species of early man arising in Europe and Asia. As we now know, none of them arose there – every single successful new species of man arose in Africa instead. For whatever reason, man evolves in Africa and then spreads north, not the other way round.

Like most white racist ideas, “Snow Makes You Smarter” takes the current power imbalance and sees it as the natural order of things – when it is anything but. White people, people from Europe, have been the most advanced part of mankind only twice – now and back in Greek and Roman times. Otherwise they have been middling to backwards.

Egypt, where the average IQ is 83

See also:

Wikipedia: IQ and the Wealth of Nations – where I got the IQ numbers from, which in turn come from Richard Lynn. The article notes that the correlation between a country’s average IQ and its average high winter temperature is -0.76 – pretty good! – but skin colour is an even better match at -0.92.

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I must be a genius because I live in Canada. Oh, I forgot, I would have had to have lived there for tens of thousands of years. But wait, some of my ancestors did. They were indigenous. But according to the HBders, they are, were, still dumb! I guess I’m not to smart after all! Oh shucks!

That reindeer looks like it’s laughing! Does he know something we don’t? I notice he has a big head! With the combination of the cold and a big head he must be a genius! As to the contention that cold makes one smarter, now I have heard everything! What will they come up with next, to prove their ‘superiority’?

You guys say crap like:
*things evolve faster in warmer climates
*cold climates cause organisms to go dormant or kills them outright
*Africa could have very well been a colder climate in ancestoral times

To Vagrant’s ridiculous claim that cold climates “cause organisms to go dormant or kills them outright”. He prefaces this by saying that he is no biologist which puts him on the same level as me in terms of academic credentials. Yet he still comments on the topic.

Vagrant is unable to grasp that he has bolstered my argument. Yes, cold climates are harsh and they can kill you easier than temperate climates *which is the whole point*. “What doesn’t kill you makes you (or your group) stronger.” Ever heard that saying?

To survive, people who are now more closely related to caucasians and mongoloids had to develop strategies to overcome those harsher conditions. If they didn’t, they would perish. They didn’t perish and passed on their tools to their descendents. One of those tools was a bigger brain, higher cognitive ability, and better visio-spatial skill.

Survival of the fittest shaped humans. That’s pretty widely accepted as the general process of human evolution. What is considered “fit” differed depending on environment. In Africa, the species faced nothing new. By staying at “home base”, the humans who were there weren’t forced to compete for intelligence. Since equitorial Africa was plush with plants and berries (which most ancestoral Africans ate), they didn’t struggle for food or have to come up with novel ways to get food.

The people who migrated out of Africa developed in tandem with other forces. Those groups used language and developed tools and processes to survive. Those tools added an extra shot of juice in to the process. Those peoples’ environment came to include those very same tools and languages which thrusted them *even further* forward in evolutionary terms.

Vagrant X may be correct in saying that warm climates foster newer and more species than other climates. But this doesn’t refute the story of evolution or the story of IQ disparities. Africa got the species there; other places forced it to evolve faster than it otherwise would have.

***

King, your whole argument is unfounded. There is no reason to believe that Africa has ever been colder than the more polar or temporally polar regions. That defies the laws of nature anyway, the Earth has always been round with an equator that is more exposed to the sun than other parts of the globe. Do you deny that? Regardless, it is the being forced to move portion of the equation that propeled the brains and IQs upward. Groupifying, developing language, encountering novel minerals and landscapes (different from Africa) that allowed those groups to build upon whatever they had already built upon were part of this process.

Individuals today are a microcosm of this very same process. Generally speaking, the less intelligent people are the country bumpkins who’ve remained in their little village for their whole lives (this was much more true before TV and the internet, but the point remains.) It was the people who were lucky enough to build upon their rudimentary knowledge that they learned in that village and added to it all of the worldly experiencecs and knowledge they’d pick up at cultural meccas and through other travels. Through that lifetime the person added novel knowledge that they wouldn’t have learned if they remained that bumpkin in the village in which they were born.

Africa is the only place on earth that has a clear, proven record of greatly increasing human intelligence.

So it is perfectly fine to accept that Africa greatly increased human intelligence – hell it *made* humans human – but it far-reaching and flat out racist to suggest that development in other locales wouldn’t have propelled us even further?

To me, you seem to truncate the process. You pretend as if evolution mysteriously stopped right after the development of the people in Africa. But it didn’t.

Africa provided a baseline linear pathway for human development and evolution. When some of the groups and individuals “went their own way”, they faced novel environments and were forced to develop new methods of survival. Language was one biggie. Farming was another. Hunting big animals was one too. All of these processes built upon each other and led to higher IQ.

Africa fostered humans’ ancestors and the human race, but it didn’t tinker with them as well as Europe and Asia did. It’s not just the cold climates that caused this – although you must remember that Europe during that time was much colder than it is today. We’ve only come out of the last ice age in the past 20,000 years. It was the cohesion of several inexplicable forces that caused what we, today, call higher innate IQ.

Granted, IQ is a Western concept. We are only talking about IQ because “the victors are telling history” and measuring traits that victors monopolize. *But* that very admission implies that whites do have higher innate IQ.

lol! Girl, I think there’s something to that. I mean, I live in the middle of Canada; one of the coldest provinces…it’s not called Winterpeg, Manitoba for nothing. 😛 Where I’m from, the people should be considered supergeniuses due to the extreme temperatures. 😉

Abagond, I’m not sure what your policy is, but I’ll post my response from ‘Steve Sailer’. If it’s not allowed, you can simply delete.

@ Chuck

“King, your whole argument is unfounded. There is no reason to believe that Africa has ever been colder than the more polar or temporally polar regions.

STRAW MAN: Don’t be ridiculous… NOBODY said that Africa was colder than the more polar regions, the climates just weren’t necessarily different enough to make your “cold brain” argument.

The entire African continent is not now and never has been on the equator… check your map. There is more non-equatorial land mass in Africa then there is in Europe.

Climates have changed dramatically over the eons. That is why you can now find tropical turtle fossils on Greenland and tropical fish fossils in Antarctica. You have no idea what the relative temperatures were during much of the migratory periods.

You don’t even know the exact positioning of the continents when migration began!!

man, you guys are so hilarious. taking the most naive interpreation of these arguments to imply that if you live in canada or greenland you’re a genius.

while there is a hgher correlation between distance from the equator and IQ, the most salient point is that the novelty of the environment forced these new inhabitants to place more value and mating pressure on intelligence. the smartest of the group became valued which was a change from the status quo in Africa. there was less pressure to select for intelligence in africa because the inhabitants were pretty familiar with their terrain and their niche.

besides building shelter for the winter, there was also the chore of hunting novel animals (the hunting of animals was relatively novel anyway as african ancestors weren’t exactly hunters).

you insist on ignoring the major thrust of my argument. did not new environments put more pressure on groups of people to develop new “skills” i.e. intelligence to deal with them?

africans existed within africa. by its sheer location as an equitorial or a temperate zone, it likely had a relatively consistent climate. our ancestors developed in tandem with that climate and terrain that they were already familiar with. it was the new territory and climate that sped up the process of evolution as it pertains to intelligence and problem-solving.

“Yes, cold climates are harsh and they can kill you easier than temperate climates *which is the whole point*. “What doesn’t kill you makes you (or your group) stronger.” Ever heard that saying?

Couldn’t the same be said about the tropics? Afterall there is higher instances of viruses and microorganisms that can kill off the weak, plantlife that is poisonous, large game ect.

This cherry-picking of info is getting to be rediculois. One may die quicker in the tundra because of hypothermia but let’s not forget the tropics have a host of dangers. Exposure to poisonous herbs, dangerous animals, viruses and the so on. Yet no one is making the case that the being indigenous to the tropics makes people smarter. Instead we have people creating pet theories built on cherry-picked data to validate their racism.

the problem is that parasites are problems that aren’t dealt with on a strategic level (at least in the era we are talking about before the advent of medicine). intelligence, which is what we’re discussing, can’t really assuage those problems.

the human body and evolution have other ways of dealing with parasites. humans typically select for more symmetrical faces in partners because that indicates that they are healthier and less prone to getting parasites. supple skin is another thing that is universally selected for much for the same reasons.

***

I’d like to bring up another point. What we are ultimately arguing about is whether the Western way of life is inherently better than the African way of life. While I wholeheartedly believe that whites have higher IQ, that only goes to show that they operate better in the Western world of their own construction. But the argument that always takes place is that blacks are equally implementable into that Western way of life. So the argument is always on the terms of IQ etc.

Blacks excel at many other things compared to whites. There are tradeoffs to higher IQ in the group aggregate.

Chuck what was the difference in the mean continental temperatures during the human migration from Africa to Europe?

Chuck where exactly were each of the continents, relative to their distance from the equator during each stage of the migration?

Chuck, how are you able to make predictions of the effects of temperature based on relative position to the equator when you don’t know either of these things?

*NOT to mention that excessive cold is not any bigger a factor than is excessive heat, drought, or flood. So even if you could somehow prove that you knew the primeval temperature, it wouldn’t mean anything.

It’s a looser argument. Most people forget that evolution requires millions of years to make significant changes to any species,

That’s not true. The genus Homo has not existed for more than a couple of million years, but about ten different species of Homo have developed. Homo sapiens has not existed for more than a couple hundred thousand years.

As to evolutionary influences on intelligence, I would propose that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture had a large effect. See this paper for details: http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long. The idea that very long periods of time are needed for substantial changes in allele frequencies is a popular myth that has no basis in science.

To the extent that cold climates have enhanced intelligence, the effect must have been stronger in agriculturalists. According to Lynn, modern hunter-gatherers get the lowest IQ scores of all populations studied. The exception to this pattern are the Eskimos with an average score of 91, which is higher than that of agriculturalists from the warmest climates.

It cracks me up to see white people not only declaring themselves the highest IQ holders, but also them declaring that an actual person’s intelligence can be measured by a TEST. LOL

Actual true human intelligence CANNOT be accurately measured. Far too many factors come into play (and get in the way) to come up with a true assessment.

If looking at technological accomplishments declare IQ levels, then on this present day, the east asians clearly BLOW whites away! And what about the usual white argument about grade scores? Not only east asians and south asians (people of India and its surrounding lands) are out-doing whites GPA-wise, but african immigrants are as well.

As for whites currently being on top… we can all agree. But it’s not from their “amazingly high IQs”. Whites have thrashed their way to the top through the barrel of a gun. Don’t believe me?…… just check out earth human history.

And inventions? There are wayyyyyyy too many notable inventions (past and recent) that whites have plagiarised (stolen) from non-white individuals. So I guess robbers and thieves are just simply “naturally more intelligent”. So on THAT pointed example, the typical white mind SHOULD declare blacks and hispanics as the highest “IQ” holders.
(Hypocrisy is a b*tch)

And so… this IQ test. Think about it….. a MAN or a series of people had to come up with this “test”. Now….. whose intelligence are we using to measure “intelligence”?
That question in itself points out the flawed concept of “IQ”.

It cracks me up to see white people not only declaring themselves the highest IQ holders, but also them declaring that an actual person’s intelligence can be measured by a TEST. LOL

Naturally, IQ is not a perfect measure of cognitive ability, but it is the most reliable and powerful variable in social science. If there’s a better metric, I haven’t seen it.

According to most studies, East Asians outscore whites by about 5 IQ points, so I don’t understand what you mean that whites would have the highest IQs.

Whites have thrashed their way to the top through the barrel of a gun. Don’t believe me?…… just check out earth human history.

All peoples that have been dominant at some point in history did it by dominating others militarily.

And inventions? There are wayyyyyyy too many notable inventions (past and recent) that whites have plagiarised (stolen) from non-white individuals. So I guess robbers and thieves are just simply “naturally more intelligent”. So on THAT pointed example, the typical white mind SHOULD declare blacks and hispanics as the highest “IQ” holders.

Name ten inventions that whites have “stolen” from blacks or Hispanics.

This reminds me of explanations pale people give as to why they have pale skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Because of the cold. It caused a “mutation”.

I just look at them and ask, why Inuits don’t have blond hair and blue eyes when they have been in a much colder climate for a longer period of time. I also ask what environmental factors attribute to the turning of ones eyes from a dominant color to blue and ones hair blond? The same traits you see in albinos.

This whole “cold FRONT” (cause Yah knows they’re fronting) is some bullshit in the same pseudo-scientific category as phrenology and drapetomania.

The country where I spend most of my time right now has quite a few different micro-climates that go from almost arctic to moderate to mediterranean/ sub-tropical. The people that live in the areas that get extremely cold are considered to be not quite the brightest lights. (Unfortunately true.) And those people live there for countless generations. Some can go as far back as the 13th century. Those areas are mostly rural without much intellectual stimulus.

In this country, the most intelligent by Western biased IQ testing actually live in the urban areas which have a generally moderate climate, also in winter, and can get really hot in summer.

On a related note, I recently made a trip to Cameroon, primarily for professional reasons. I’m lucky enough to have family over there where I could stay. Two cousins of mine are successful professionals in Douala. The weather was muggy to say the least. Not too hot, around 25C, but very damp. It rained every day for a few hours. But in daytime, once the sun came through for just an hour or so I felt like I was suffocating. Being used to the low humidity in Europe, I felt like I couldn’t function properly. Everything felt like in slow motion. I just couldn’t concentrate like I normally would. Anyway I’m sure I would have failed any so-called IQ test (Western style, timed under pressure…) quite miserably. My cousin was not much less knocked down by the weather although one might assume that he is used to it, being 100% African.

This is once again just one example which might not directly prove anything, like the tests themselves. Going by common sense though, it’s safe to assume that your momentary mental and physical shape influenced by your environment can have some drastic influence on the result of any “IQ tests” which are systematically questionable anyway.

What is this IQ test everyone is taking? Anybody know? How could one devise a test without cultural bias?

Cultural bias is indeed a problem when comparing IQ results from very different cultures. For this reason, I regard Lynn’s global IQ data only as suggestive, not conclusive. Tests administered to different racial groups in the same country are a lot more reliable, and the consensus is that in the US, IQ tests are not biased against any group that speaks English natively (the existence or lack of test bias is an empirical question that can be investigated with statistical methods).

“Naturally, IQ is not a perfect measure of cognitive ability, but it is the most reliable and powerful variable in social science. If there’s a better metric, I haven’t seen it.

According to most studies, Studies by whom? East Asians outscore whites by about 5 IQ points, so I don’t understand what you mean that whites would have the highest IQs.”
If it’s not perfect, then why do whites use it as the gospel? Easy answer: Because it’s one created test in which whites would tend to score the most in. And once that was realized, white society declared it as the tool for “measuring intelligence”. The IQ test is one good example of the “White man’s FUBU” – “For Us By Us”.

“All peoples that have been dominant at some point in history did it by dominating others militarily.”
Typical derailment – “If they did it, then us doing it too isnt so bad.” (or) “They were the people of the times!”

“Name ten inventions that whites have “stolen” from blacks or Hispanics.”
Gotcha. Scroll back. I never mentioned “blacks and hispanics”…… YOU did. And you’re asking me to name ten. LOL I noticed that you didn’t ask me to name ONE… or even FIVE… because you’d know that would be too easy. You asked me to name ten because YOU don’t know of ten. And no, I’m not here to take your little “exam”. You (unsurprisingly) not knowing at least ten is YOUR ignorant burden, not mine.

Lynn’s review work on global racial differences in cognitive ability has been cited for misrepresenting the research of other scientists, and has been criticized for unsystematic methodology and distortion.

Many of the data points in Lynn’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations were not based on residents of the named countries. The datum for Suriname was based on tests given to Surinamese who had emigrated to the Netherlands, and the datum for Ethiopia was based on the IQ scores of a highly selected group that had emigrated to Israel, and, for cultural and historical reasons, was hardly representative of the Ethiopian population. The datum for Mexico was based on a weighted averaging of the results of a study of “Native American and Mestizo children in Southern Mexico” with results of a study of residents of Argentina.[34]

The datum that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was the mean IQ of a group of Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain.[35] Corrections were applied to adjust for differences in IQ cohorts (the “Flynn” effect) on the assumption that the same correction could be applied internationally, without regard to the cultural or economic development level of the country involved. While there appears to be rather little evidence on cohort effect upon IQ across the developing countries, one study in Kenya (Daley, Whaley, Sigman, Espinosa, & Neumann, 2003) shows a substantially larger cohort effect than is reported for developed countries (p.?)[34]

In a critical review of The Bell Curve, psychologist Leon Kamin faulted Lynn for disregarding scientific objectivity, misrepresenting data, and for racism.[36] Kamin argues that the studies of cognitive ability of Africans in Lynn’s meta-analysis cited by Herrnstein and Murray show strong cultural bias. Kamin also reproached Lynn for concocting IQ values from test scores that have no correlation to IQ.[37] Kamin also notes that Lynn excluded a study that found no difference in White and Black performance, and ignored the results of a study which showed Black scores were higher than White scores.[38]

“Science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

Summary

Promoting biological sameness in humans is illogical, even dangerous
To ignore the possibility of group diversity is to do poor science and poor medicine
A robust moral position is one that embraces this diversity as among humanity’s great assets”

Be prepared for evidence of H. Erectus admixture in Oceanic populations to surface, just like the recent Neanderthal admixture paper showed that non-Africans were part Neanderthal.

As a white dude who has played a lot of Basketball in his youth, I can assure you – Humans are definitely NOT all the same. In a wide variety of attributes. Liberal creationism is not the answer to racism, people.

Another take on this can be found in Michael Bradleys’, text, ‘The Iceman Inheritance’. Some ‘reviews’ suggest that this is reverse arayanism, but it is definitely intriguing.

“Michael Bradley delves back into our glacial past during the last Ice Age in order to find the prehistoric sources of the white race’s aggression, racism and sexism. Relying on the researches of Alexander Marshack, Carleton Coon, Konrad Lorenz, S.L. Washburn, Ralph Solecki and others, Bradley offers a persuasive argument that the white race, the Neanderthal-Caucasoids, are more aggressive than others because of ancient sexual maladaptation. And, in tracing the effects of Caucasian aggression, Bradley offers an uncomfortable and all-too-plausible explanation for the pattern of human history. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.”

i don’t believe in no IQ test. it all depends in what kind of environment you live in , your educational studies etc. for example there are people that have go to school and learn different fields out a book and don’t have no common sense.

According to most studies, Studies by whom? East Asians outscore whites by about 5 IQ points, so I don’t understand what you mean that whites would have the highest IQs.”

Studies by tons of people, mostly whites and Asians.

If it’s not perfect, then why do whites use it as the gospel? Easy answer: Because it’s one created test in which whites would tend to score the most in. And once that was realized, white society declared it as the tool for “measuring intelligence”. The IQ test is one good example of the “White man’s FUBU” – “For Us By Us”.

Like I said, whites are not the group with the highest average IQ, so your argument fails in this respect. IQ tests were originally invented by Binet and colleagues in France to investigate variation in intelligence among white French schoolchildren. Psychometrics was created mostly by white people, just like modern science in general. IQ tests are used because they are a reliable and valid tool backed up by tons of research. Of course, you can criticize IQ, or GDP, or the Gini Index, or even, say, relativity and the uncertainty principle, but if you want to be taken seriously, you will have to come up with better arguments than “they were invented by white people”.

Typical derailment – “If they did it, then us doing it too isnt so bad.” (or) “They were the people of the times!”

It was not “derailment”, but a statement of fact. And I wasn’t claiming that military domination by whites or anybody else is not bad, but rather I was implying that your assertion that Europeans rose to dominance “through the barrel of a gun” is an uninsightful, almost tautological (because political domination over other peoples is almost always achieved through military domination) argument.

For example, the Arabs’ rapid rise to dominance over much of the world in the 7th and 8th centuries was one of the more remarkable occurrences in history. Now, you would probably say that they managed to conquer other peoples simply because they were militarily more powerful. As a proximate explanation, that’s of course true, but what really is interesting are the ideological, organizational, technological, psychological, and other factors that enabled the Arabs to overwhelm their opponents. Similarly, what is interesting about the European conquest of much of the world are the factors that made Europeans so superior over their opponents.

“Name ten inventions that whites have “stolen” from blacks or Hispanics.”
Gotcha. Scroll back. I never mentioned “blacks and hispanics”…… YOU did. And you’re asking me to name ten. LOL I noticed that you didn’t ask me to name ONE… or even FIVE… because you’d know that would be too easy. You asked me to name ten because YOU don’t know of ten. And no, I’m not here to take your little “exam”. You (unsurprisingly) not knowing at least ten is YOUR ignorant burden, not mine.

Okay, I read your argument as stating that blacks and Hispanics specifically had been these great unsung inventors, but your argument is in fact that there were no such blacks or Hispanics, right? Who were they then? You said that “There are wayyyyyyy too many notable inventions (past and recent) that whites have plagiarised (stolen) from non-white individuals”, so I thought that it would be extremely easy for you to name just ten, but I was clearly mistaken. I interpret your refusal to mention even one as an admission that you cannot think of any.

How do you even decide if some invention was “stolen”? People all around the world use televisions, cars, computers, airplanes, and other “white inventions”, but are they “stolen” inventions? In any case, your characterization of the history of science and technology in Europe and its offshoots as that of “robbers and thieves” is moronic.

Murray and Herrnstein describe Lynn as “a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences.” Here’s a sample of Lynn’s thinking on such differences: “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.” (cited in Newsday, 11/9/94)

Elsewhere Lynn makes clear which “incompetent cultures” need “phasing out”: “Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?” (cited in New Republic, 10/31/94)

Phillipe Rushton:

Rushton (who’s gotten more than $770,000 from Pioneer) has transformed the Victorian science of cranial measurement into a sexual fetish–measuring not only head and brain size, but also the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals. “It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything,” he told Rolling Stone’s Adam Miller (10/20/94), explaining his philosophy of evolution.

Rushton was reprimanded by his school, the University of Western Ontario, for accosting people in a local shopping mall and asking them how big their penises were and how far they could ejaculate. “A zoologist doesn’t need permission to study squirrels in his backyard,” he groused (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94).

Get a life, you dumbbells! I come from the real North boys. You guys live in the deep south from my perspective and so did your forefathers, who came from such southern places like England, Scotland and Ireland. Bah! 😀

I laugh at you southern boys since my family roots can be traced way back as long as there are church records from the middle ages and we have always lived in Finland. And since, as you guys have witnessed here, further north and colder the climate equals bigger brains and huge intellect, I declare my self supreme compared to you! 😀

Now, if for any reason you try to make a case against my supreme intellect and supreme humanity in any way, you must admit that your claims are full of reindeershit. You know, we do have reindeers up here. The ones father Christmas uses. And guess what? He lives in Finland too and his real name is Joulupukki. And how I know this? Because I am more intelligent than you southern slouches because I live up here north, just like my father, his father and so on to the beginning of time. 😀

Since millions of white people in America live in relative prosperity as opposed to the poorer people in America, the “third world” nations on Africa, Central and South America and the Caribbean, then it follows that their children will be much brighter and smarter than the average white Americans children would be given their harsher living conditions should those conditions persist….now that IQ will be relative to the conditions in which it was developed, ie it would respond to the challenges of its environment and evolve as the populations and generations change…as such this evolution would be discounted if the conditions were fostered and held up by a system that wants only certain (controllable,predictable, based on preconcieved notions coated in science) types of intelligences to exist, discounting all others…

@chuckie and dumbmonk: heres more evidence that living up north makes you much more intelligent and smarter than living in any where below the Artic Circle. And kids, this is for real! This is not something invented in the university toilet 😀

Granted, if the IQ became higher as a result of tougher living conditions, then it stands to reason that it was not a conscious choice but rather a forced one,circumstantial. These dudes take pride in something proactively that they were not responsible for instead of using all of their supposed greatness to actually do something right here, right now…on top of that they only do it since it runs contrary to the people with “low IQ”, thus defined here in terms of their climatological experience instead of overt racism…

If IQ can be made higher due to relatively harsh living conditions and a group of people who live in said conditions are smarter than those who do not, doesnt that mean that the IQ of the initial group of people can slip over generations due to easier living conditions? If these same people then tried to create the means by which intelligence was measured, dont their views require the upmost scrutiny due to their easier living conditions, and assumingly slipping generational IQ?

The “eugenic/dysgenic” cycle reads like garbage, since the cornerstone of foundation “civilization” is being “civil.” They speak in terms of technological advancements, such advancements do not positively or negatively correlate to social advancement.

1. “Africa is the only place on earth that has a clear, proven record of greatly increasing human intelligence.” Sorry abagond, this is just not true. Landmass does not influence human intellect. Because…

2. Apart from the extremes, ie tropic regions vs. arctic ones, you find comparable conditions on all of the continents, conditions that change over time. The climate is far too unstable to have a acknowledgeable effect on humans.

3. If intellect was in direct correlation to cold weather, then people living on the mountains should be smarter than those living in the valleys. There are people, for example in Peru, or Tibet, that have lived in high altitudes for generations, enough time to evolve differently in comparison to people from the same climate zone but living in the valleys, IF climate had an influence on something as principal as intellect (hair and skin colour can adapt very quick because only few genes are responsible).

4. If it isn’t “cold=intellect” but “hardship=intellect” then esquimos and people living in deserts (for example the tuareg) would be equally smart and together smarter than anybody else on the planet.

5. Epigenetics. Even IF snow=intellect, the way how we live our lives has a direct influence on our genes. By utilizing the machinery, techniques, etc. of other cultures (and no one would proclaim that black people can’t drive cars or use computers) people from the no-snow-regions would by now have caught up, intellect-wise. Epigenetics have an incredibly high turnover. There are people in villages in the Netherlands that were under occupation during WW2 and whose inhabitants starved a lot, and their descendants even today have an increased probability to develop obesity and diabetes, their bodies still remember the starvation of their forefathers.

So, all in all: I think it would be a good idea if only people that actually understand genetics would comment on the possibly inferior genetics of another race. Because, quite honestly, the chance for bullshit being spread is very, very high.

(Yes, I DO have an idea about genetics. It’s not my primary area of interest, but I DO have a fundated education in evolutionary ecology, thanks go to Nico Michiels).

“”” since the cornerstone of foundation “civilization” is being “civil.” “””

That’s really just wordplay.
Tell that to the Aztecs/Spartans/Mesopotamians etc

What’s a cornerstone includes is literacy, rule of law, agriculture, and applied math, not necessarily “being civil”. But yes, civilization is thought to have a domesticating effect over a long enough time. The criminal element keeps getting locked up, which takes them out of the breeding pool.

“such advancements do not positively or negatively correlate to social advancement.”

the problem is that parasites are problems that aren’t dealt with on a strategic level (at least in the era we are talking about before the advent of medicine). intelligence, which is what we’re discussing, can’t really assuage those problems.

The problems presented by parasites, poison ect have been solved by indigenous populations in the tropics before common era. Im sure you have heard of tribal and herbal medicine usage. There are more that 100 compounds used in mainstream medicines that have similar uses in tribal medicine. Some of the best known pain killers (aspirin, morphine ) are derived from plants that have been used by indigenous populations to cure various aliments for thousands of years.

Many believe tribal medicines are a crock however the study of tribal/herbal medicine has led to many modern day medicinal advances. These tribal populations would have to be mentally novel to use and retain plant knowledge to come up with remedies for such problems.

Dr. Vagrant X,
I’m going to connect to the Goddess Hathor-Sekhmet and all things ancient and answer the questions posed to Solution5050.

10 things the Northern people borrowed, perhaps not stolen, from the Southern people.
* Bathing
* Using perfume
* Mathematics
* Not getting their drinking water from the latrine – didn’t figure that out until 1800 years after the Romans
* The Arch
* Gunpowder(maybe southern China)
* Stone cutting
* Metal smelting
* Fire – No exactly borrowed but something they had to know before they left Africa or otherwise they would have not survived in the Cold.

Ok, so let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that cold does make you smarter.
Why do Native Americans test so low in terms of IQ then? They have been in the Americas no longer than 15,000 years. They descend from the same roots as the Koreans and Chinese – people who lived through the Ice Age of East Asia. The ancestors of Native Americans had to endure even tougher, colder conditions migrating from East Asia to North America. Why then, do Eskimos have average IQ of 90? Why do countries like Peru (90) and Mexico (87) test so low, when they are a mix of Spaniards (99) with Native Americans whose ancestors survived the challenging and chilly trek through Beringia?

Civilisations developed independently in Mexico and the Andes that were far more complex than anything northern Europe developed independently, until the last 1000 years when northern Europeans were able to build on the innovations of Mediterranean people. So why are Native Americans not the smartest of us all?

This discussion about whether “snow makes you smarter” has been fascinating almost as much as it has been scary.

I’m going to bypass the assumed connection between brain-size and intelligence since that’s been proven to be wrong by scientists for decades now. (FYI intelligence is far more influenced by education level, social class, where you grew up, how you grew up, the socio-political context you grew up in, and of course the very definition of “intelligence” has been questioned for its denotations as being ethnocentric to Western Civilization’s standards and not defining intelligence as it pertains to all cultures.

But like I said, gonna bypass that because I have a much more fun argument to make.)

If cold-climates increase intelligence (as well as various other skills mentioned by Chuck and mothers) then why, as Abagond mentions in his post, do Inuits and native Siberians not have the most advanced and intelligent civilizations by our standards? Why is it that only White “northerners” are intelligent, advanced, and civilized?

And again, as Abagond mentioned (which nobody seems to be talking about, strangely) is that the classical civilizations that most of us learned about in school began in tropical, Mediterranean, and equatorial climates. I’m thinking specifically of the Aztecs, Mayans, Sumerians, Babylonians, Indus Valley, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Shang Dynasty (which is the farthest, or one of the farthest, north). Notably, only two of these are European, and only one is really that far north relatively speaking.

Even going further in history, the most advanced civilizations (from our Western perspective) haven’t really been Western civilizations in far northern climates. The only Western civilizations that were very advanced comparatively/overall were the Greeks and Romans.

If you want to go up to the Renaissance-era Europe, which was when Europe regained much of the knowledge it lost in the aftermath of the Roman Empire’s collapse, the most advanced civilizations were STILL not from anywhere in the northern climates. In fact, the Ottoman empire (and also the Byzantines till the Ottoman’s destroyed them) was the most advanced in mathematics, science, and medicine, as well as the largest preserver of written knowledge at the time. (Again, I’m speaking from the Western historical perspective, since that’s where we are in this debate dealing with White people supposedly being smarter because they’re from cold-climates.) So, again, history proves wrong this supposedly scientific theory.

Let’s go back in time now, way way back. Back to the beginning of hominid evolution. Remember Neanderthals? They were among the first of our evolutionary ancestors to leave Africa and migrate into northern climates. Then, they were followed by Cro-Magnon.

Now, according to Chuck and the other HBDers in this debate, cold-climates enabled “people who are now more closely related to caucasians and mongoloids” to develop tools, “One of those tools was a bigger brain, higher cognitive ability, and better visio-spatial skill. “

Yet, as we see in the archaeological record (feel free to chime in here anytime Mira, since my archaeological skill is not as good as yours since you got your degree!) that Cro-Magnon, who had JUST — evolutionary time-scale speaking — left Africa for northern climates basically out-adapted Neanderthals, winning against them in competition for territory, for game, and in basic warfare.

Again, this has been shown in the archaeological record from various grave sites, and burial grounds where Neanderthal bodies have had wounds in them, as well as remains of Cro-Magnon sites in territories that were previously inhabited by Neanderthals. (I’m thinking specifically of the studies done by Dr. William E Banks, but there are others — from Marcellin Boule to now.)

So despite being adapted to cold climates for a longer period of time, Neanderthals were unable to compete or out-survive Cro-Magnons, who had less time to adapt to the colder climates.

It should also be noted that Neanderthals had similar to larger cranial capacity which strongly indicates that they had brains as big, if not bigger, than ours. And in the case of this discussion, that means they had comparable intelligence too!

So, AGAIN, history proves this theory wrong. And it has been proven wrong so many times by so many scientists working in such disparate fields that one has to wonder if this so much about science as it is about racism.

Because the only time in history have northern civilizations been the most advanced, intelligent, dominant, etc etc, has been in the last 300 or so years when Europe began its age of conquest. Yet now, there is evidence that the dominance of Western Civilizations is eroding as countries like China, India, Iran, Israel, and others considered “Third World” begin to catch up in the aftermath of colonialist/post-colonialist era. (This is especially true when you consider the out-sourcing of labor, as well as our US debt that countries like China own.)

Now, while I’m sure those who disagree will attempt to ad-hominem, create fallacies, and cherry-pick my comments to death with their own cherry-picked data and sources, the reality is that science by and large, over a long period of time has shown this idea connecting cold-climate with intelligence — and particularly Chuck’s assertions about brain-size, cognitive abilities, and visio-spatial skills — to be wrong. And this is backed-up by our own history.

So let me reiterate: THIS THEORY IS DEBUNKED, THIS THEORY IS DEBUNKED. RACISTS AT WORK. USE EXTREME CAUTION! =P

i’ll turn to the whole of your argument sometime tomorrow, but let me first point out that you reiterate one important facet of this entire argument: many groups *but* black people have developed independent civilizations to any great degree. many groups *but* blacks have created inventions and processes that have pushed humans towards their current situation.

what is it about the inhabitants of the “mother land” that they weren’t able to develop any meaningful civilization on their own continent?

also, as i’ve said several times, abagond simplifies the hypothesis of HBDers. nobody claims absolutely that the further toward the poles these groups move the higher their IQ. rather, there is a correlation between latitude and IQ. the correlation probably breaks down at some point. just as height is strongly correlated to basketball prowess, at some point height becomes a disadvantage i.e. over 7′ 5″.

at some point much further up north, people who had to dedicate *all* of their resources towards survival weren’t able to focus on other facets of social and political development. when climate became too much of a focus it would be very difficult to develop those brians to apply any of their power to anything but overcoming cold weather. plus, very few people sought to conquer those territories, thus, those ways of life developed in a sort of vacuum.

it was the admixture of migration plus increasingly urban and political lifestyles plus the need for language, ledgering, and writing plus big game hunting and then farming mixed with a relatively temperate environment that existed north of africa that allowed for these things to occur all at once. in short, more temperate zones that reside outside of africa were prime locales for humans to hone their intelligence. migration was the impetus for all of this. africans didn’t migrate.

Now you’re conflating Blacks and Africans. First you say every race except “blacks” have done the things I mentioned, but then you switch them into Africans.

You do realize Africa is a continent that supports over a billion people right? And that even during hominid evolution had an astounding bio-diversity?

Basically… Nubian civilization, Zulu civilization, Egyptian, etc, they are all African, but not all of them would be considered “Black”, since race didn’t exist as a category until about the 13th century, and not a widespread category until the 17th century.

And since your correlation between latitude and IQ isn’t supported historically, it can only mean that it’s a modern phenomenon if it’s true at all. However, basket-ball isn’t a good metaphor since outliers exist in that category, and because you’re talking about proving a scientific theory.

But it is interesting that you backtrack on the climate issue by saying,

at some point much further up north, people who had to dedicate *all* of their resources towards survival weren’t able to focus on other facets of social and political development. when climate became too much of a focus it would be very difficult to develop those brians to apply any of their power to anything but overcoming cold weather. plus, very few people sought to conquer those territories, thus, those ways of life developed in a sort of vacuum.

So now cold-climates actually inhibit civilization? I’m all for moderation, but you’re only proving my point and disproving your own that IQ correlates positively with IQ in the historical record.

Why is it that out of all the temperate zones, only Africa didn’t develop higher intelligence? Africa has temperate zones — and in fact, pretty much has every climate possible on Earth. Yet, you say they are lacking in IQ but the rest of the world (especially White, Western Civilization) isn’t? This isn’t scientific Chuck, nor is it even logical. You’re making an entire continent into it’s own outlier when there are myriad examples to Africa’s various civilizations, thus proving the intelligence of the various inhabitants, and thus disproving your theory, especially since those climates where those civilizations developed AREN’T cold climates.

I mean, I don’t even need anything EXCEPT the historical record for this discussion.

However, you did bring up a good point at the end. The “the admixture of migration plus increasingly urban and political lifestyles plus the need for language, ledgering, and writing plus big game hunting and then farming mixed with a relatively temperate environment” is the kind of thinking that’ll help you understand the myriad, complex, and often non-biological causes behind the development of human society, including race.

Feel free to comment further on my thoughts, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer them any better than I already have. The evidence has been presented to you a bunch of times by various commenters and Abagond. Nobody is trying to convince you, but nobody is going to be convinced by you either.

Actually, I’ve never heard of “snow makes you smarter” argument… Probably because I live among white people in a place with continental climate. 😀

Also, I don’t buy “average IQ in Africa is 70”. There must be something wrong about it. I believe 70 is almost mental retardation. (I mean, nothing against people with low IQ, they also have a lot to give to the world… But there’s NO WAY average IQ of any group can be within marks of mental retardation). I mean, isn’t this, like the obvious proof something’s wrong with the IQ tests?

Also, Abagond:

Mankind arose in Africa. The north did have Neanderthals and Homo erectus.

I said and I’ll repeat again: Homo erectus appeared in Africa! It was a very important “step” (so to speak) in human evolution, and Homo erectus originated in Africa!

As for Neanderthals, we are not sure. There are people who see them as separate species (Homo Neanderthalenis) that fist appeared in Europe. However, there are experts who see them as a branch of Homo Sapiens (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis, as the opposite of our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens)… And first (Archaic) Homo sapiens originate in- guess where?- Africa.

My old psychology lecturer demonstrated that the IQ test can be ‘beat’ if you practise enough. She practised so many times she scored an IQ over 200. IQ tests are supposed to be reliable, but if one can practise them to get a higher and higher IQ, are they really reliable?

One of the fallacies that are repeated here and on other blogs is that race didn’t existed until the 17th century.That’s like saying people could fly because Newton hadn’t discovered gravity. It was only beginning with the 17th century that the development of European exploration and reliable world-wide communication network combined with the development of a systematic scientific approach allowed for the level of contact to be elevate enough for a systemic analysis to be conducted. Race had always existed , it was only then that the necessary concepts and conditions were met for it’s definition as a category. Before that contacts were either in the form of invasions or limited trading relations combined with a lack of scientific approach.

@Chuck
First off, in the argument that evolution has favoured whites it seems that the conclusion that whites are more ‘intelligent’ was drawn first and then attempts were made to explain it scientifically. So the key points here are:
1. Whites are more intelligent because the average IQ score of whites is higher.
2. Whites are more intelligent because they had to live in adverse climate, so they had to develop tools to make their lives easier, so they evolved to be more intelligent. Their climate was just ideal for that.

1. Abagond has already said it, IQ tests are not perfect measure of intelligence. There are a lot of factors that influence the outcome of the test, such as the subject’s health, wealth, mood, interest, stress etc. and factors not related to the subject, like the test pattern, test conductor’s neutrality etc.
2. Several people have already pointed the flaw with the argument. Here’s a wiki link that lists many important inventions. In Palolithic era, apart from spear and flute in Germany and boats in Australia the major inventions/advancements were almost all from Africa including cooking (wasn’t there a beauty expert that said Africans didn’t know how to cook?) and mining. From 10000 to 1000 BC, the list is dominated by India(Indus Valley), China, Egypt and the Middle-East(Mesopotamia). Barely any European name is there. Since 1000 BC Greece and Rome starts to appear on the list alongside China and India. From 800 AD to 1200 AD Middle East dominates the list with occasional mention of China and few mentions of Egypt, India and Europe. From 15th century European countries start to appear again and from 17th century they clearly dominate the list. China, Middle East, Egypt and India disappear from the list.

So if the winter temperature of Europe didn’t make a sudden plunge in the 15th century, the ‘snow makes you smarter’ theory fails. Instead, the data seem to correlate better with the main colonising powers of the world at different times. From the seventh century the colonisation of Africa started. From the 12th century Sultani era(also known as Muslim conquest) started in India and in 15th century Mongols invaded China. By the time non-European countries disappear from the list Europe has established its supremacy over the rest of the world.
It is also important to note the nature of the inventions. Indian inventions included toilet, bathroom, drainage, plastic surgery, cataract surgery, early form of chess etc; the kind directly related to the comfort of living because life was easier and secured by the Himalayan belt. Chinese inventions included trebuchet, gunpowder, compass, suspension bridge, rotary fan, paper, printing press, gun; nearly all-encompassing. Egyptian inventions included metal block printing, fountain pen, astrolabic quadrant, hand cannon, explosive gunpowder etc; with an emphasis of the kind of tools used in architecture. Middle Eastern inventions included various lamps, pharmacy(they’re rich in petroleum) etc and various astronomical, optical and medical instruments/chemicals including planetary analog computer, pinhole camera, magnifying lens and inhalation anaesthetic. European inventions included celestial sphere, catapult, anchor, crossbow, rifle etc.(until 17th century), mostly the kind that is used in navigation, voyages and fighting. So it’s not intelligence that won Europeans the wars, it’s the kind of inventions that happened in Europe. Besides with the colonies they also got the advancement that those colonies made which again helped them to conquer another civilization.

If one is to look at the list of scholars of the past few decades he will find plenty of non-white names in it, many of whom are 85-IQ Middle-Easterners and South Asians and 70-IQ blacks, even after all the poverty, lack of opportunity and discrimination. What does that tell you?

Hm, I must have missed your connection, ’cause I didn’t get your message through our ESP network (though, somehow, I was able to read your comment despite not even knowing the concept of language because I’m subhuman. Curiouser and curiouser…). Man, I really wish I knew how to speak and write, this ESP stuff is such a pain…

1. Let me ask how people arrived at the ‘IQs’ of races or countries. They might have conducted IQ tests across ‘white’ and ‘non-white’ nations/peoples. Now, many people in the developing nations are totally uneducated and many are also illiterate. How can their intelligence be measured by IQ tests?? In fact, I hope those in support of the ‘snow makes you smart’ theory remember that IQ itself is very stiffly contested as to whether it is an acceptable ‘measure’ of intelligence. For doing well in the IQ tests, a certain level of literacy/education is a must, besides other things, however much the test may claim to be of a nature that does not require any special study of any subject. And if that is a prerequisite for having ‘IQ’ (and supposedly intelligence), then how is intelligence related to race?

There is much debate as to whether there is at all any single way of defining or measuring intelligence.

2. If you look at the present scenario (i.e. from the 19th or 20th century onwards) i.e from the time when the western colonies started disintegrating, the names in the list of inventors once again included ones from middle east, Asia etc. That also supports “D’s” hypothesis correlating colonialism and the apparent* lack of inventors from Non-white or non-European communities. Especially since the latter part of the 20th century, if you look at some of the most groundbreaking technologies like semiconductors and electronics and communications, you will find that there are several non-whites feature in the list of inventors.
Some of the top corporate companies thrived on technology independently or jointly developed by ‘non-whites’ alongwith whites.

3. You will see that I used the word ‘apparent’ lack of non-whites’ names in the list of inventors in the last century or so..that is because there is enough reason to believe that racial discrimination led to many inventors from non-white communities to be completely disregarded and their works denied due recognition. One such example would be the case of Jagadish Chandra Bose from India who hardly got the kind of attention his peers got for works on radio transmission. Others include scientists like S N Bose (quote from a website: “But, international recognition eluded him. It was late in life, 34 years after his significant discovery, that he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In fact, on several occasions, he had to take testimonials from famous physicists like Albert Einstein to convince the authorities of the worth of his work.”), Benjamin Banneker, George Washington Carver, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams etc.

Surely, had there not been the racial discrimination, it is logical to say that more names of non-whites would have appeared in the list of inventors.

So the very basic assumption that whites are more intelligent than non-whites is wrong and hence there isn’t any point in trying to find out the reasons for something that isn’t even true in the first place….

The results of the so-called IQ tests the social scientists keep using for making their conclusions are obscure in the first place. Some are even suspected to be obsolete. Then the methodologies to collect the data have been repeatedly debunked by other scientists as inaccurate, incomplete, manipulated or dodged and plain unscientific. Last but not least, all that has ever been disclosed to the public are “results” in the form of coarse, eye-catching numbers. No detailed descriptions as to how the data was collected, how it was analysed, what the calculation methods were etc.

The fallacy a lot of the followers, who are obviously not scientists, run into is to assume that correlation means causation and that something being different gives any grounds to conclusions whether one is superior to the other. Fallacies which are innate to junk science. Ergo, any declarations within the purely scientific realm are pointless. The question would be, even if all of it is true – so what? Where is the scientific value in that for all mankind?

However, a big issue is that these claims are made by people who are not geneticists. The majority of them are not even experts in any field of natural science. Someone mentioned Stephen Hsu who attempts to merely find evidence for an even stronger correlation between intelligence and genetics than currently known. Although the currently known scientific findings suggest that there is a 15-50% chance that genetics alone influence intelligence, it cannot prove any correlation between intelligence and “race”. Especially in light of the fact that the existence of the genetic/biological concept of “race” is at best controversial within the scientific community, at worst invalid. Any claims of undisputed validity of the concept made by political extremists are irrelevant. As long as there is no proof beyond all scientific doubt, the claims are just what they are – disputed theories.

However, even if it were bitter cold, the overall premise doesn’t make sense, because intelligence is not the natural and inevitable result of fighting cold weather (or any other change in climate or terrain).

Think about it. What does one really have to do to fight the cold?

<b<1) Live in a big cave, all together and huddle around a fire, instead of building your own villages or small cities.

2) Rely on hunting of large animals (red meat) more than on developing large-scale agriculture, because of the long winters.

3) Rely heavily on skinning animal to provide warm clothing, rather than focusing on the intricate weaving and the dying of finer textiles.

SO What’s the verdict? You spend most of your time in a dank, and smokey cave, eating red meat, and covering yourself with animal skins. Geez, I wonder what were the cholesterol levels were on these geniuses?

Adaptation to an inhospitable environment does NOT necessitate a jump in the aggregate rate of intelligence. Sometimes, the only difference is that you have to work a LOT harder (not necessarily smarter) to survive.

Sometimes you have to spend so much effort trying to stay alive, that you have little time for things like… oh, I don’t know… Algebra, or Astronomy, Geometry, or Philosophy. You tend to shift societal importance to things like, who’s the best hunter, and who can scrape skins the fastest—or who has managed to keep their teeth, and not die of scurvy or gout, from lack of eating enough vegetables.

Judging from one of the article on that site the Vikings got of Dodge when the going got tough, that is it got to cold to sustain a regular food source. I guess you could say they were smart in that they knew when to leave!

covering yourself with animal skins

It’s too bad they didn’t have road kill back then! It would have been much easier for them.

you provided the worst argument i’ve ever read on this topic. you should probably stop trying to make the anti-HBD point because you’re actually making us look good.

you say that those groups that migrated out of africa had to work “harder and not necessarily smarter”. can’t you understand that those two are inextricable from each other. they are a differentiation from the default position that existed in african ancestors. africans worked as they worked – at a static level of intelligence and hard work. they did what they had to do. there was no impetus to “improve” in terms of intelligence b/c they had fully adapted to their environment in the absence of any exogenous large scale force of nature.

groups that exited africa had to work both harder *and* more intelligently to survive. those that survived passed on their “survivor genes” to their descendents. the change of environment led to agriculture and writing and urbanity and philosophy and mathematics, astronomy and physics. none of those existed in africa until non-africans introduced them.

in your arguments you try to pooh-pooh the eugenic properties of novel environments. dealing with more adverse climate conditions, new terrain, and different potential food sources provided that impetus towards eugenic development.

It only seems like that to you, Chuck, because you don’t understand the difference between the concepts of “harder” vs. “smarter.”

The two are NOT inextricably linked, and anyone who is not struggling to prove the unprovable can clearly see that.

Doing something differently under new circumstances may not demand any more intelligence than doing it as you had been under the previous circumstances. In fact, sometimes, the new circumstances even mean that you must begin doing things in a way that is less challenging to your intellect than before.

“NEW” does not always translate to “more INTELLECTUALLY challenging,” sometimes it’s just more physically challenging, sometimes it just means that it takes more time to do things it took less time to do before. You are building a false equivalency.

How much intelligence does it take to sleep in a hole? I mean, scrambling into the caves, where your children roll around in the reek with the dogs, covering yourself with ill-fitting animal skins against the cold. This is no great accomplishment. There were no major contributions from the colder climes of the North. Their tribes emerged late, at the edges of the great mediterranean empires as crude savages, dirty nomads with clumsy and inaccurate weapons. They brought no inventions with them to speak of, no innovations of war, no complex languages, no great cultures equal to those of the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans.

“SO What’s the verdict? You spend most of your time in a dank, and smokey cave, eating red meat, and covering yourself with animal skins. Geez, I wonder what were the cholesterol levels were on these geniuses?

Adaptation to an inhospitable environment does NOT necessitate a jump in the aggregate rate of intelligence. Sometimes, the only difference is that you have to work a LOT harder (not necessarily smarter) to survive.

Sometimes you have to spend so much effort trying to stay alive, that you have little time for things like… oh, I don’t know… Algebra, or Astronomy, Geometry, or Philosophy. You tend to shift societal importance to things like, who’s the best hunter, and who can scrape skins the fastest—or who has managed to keep their teeth, and not die of scurvy or gout, from lack of eating enough vegetables.”

You sure you have not visited Finland? That sounds a lot like this country. Well, we did not have caves, but we had a whole lotta woods, from here to Pacific actually, so we build houses from logs and worked our arses off just to survive.

Like one scientist wrote in his piece of European History, besides some nomadic tribes roamin in the northern wilderness, the only people who seemed to move in on this area above the natural limits of human life were the finns. They were the only people who tried, with varying success, to grow anything so far up north. And with that hard work we survived, had a few biblical hungers etc. but we survived.

One russian scientist even stated that the finns were the original people who lived along side the continental ice cap during the last ice age! Wow! And therefore we must be the most genius nation in the whole World! 😀

While I can appreciate your HBD-bashing, it seems a bad idea to turn around and suddenly make the same mistake by supposing that just because colder-climate nations weren’t the most advanced civilizations during the early centuries of our history that somehow There were no major contributions from the colder climes of the North. Their tribes emerged late, at the edges of the great mediterranean empires as crude savages, dirty nomads with clumsy and inaccurate weapons.

This to me is a generalization that is as much ethnocentric as Chuck’s own theories. Calling any people “savages” is insulting, and hearkens back to scientific racism in the late 19th/early 20th century, especially Louis Henry Morgan’s attempt to categorize various cultures’ stages of civilization. (Probably one of the most offensive thing I’ve had to read in my anthropology courses.)

In defense of Northern cultures, some of the earliest examples of cave art, sculpture, and group hunting techniques were developed there. And some of the earliest examples of burial practices (which strongly indicate the evidence of religion) were also found among these groups.

This issue isn’t all that black/white, except for the IQ to cold-climate theory. That part is definitely pretty simplistic.

However, in the course of disproving Chuck, you’re making the same mistakes he does.

I just saw yesterday on a travel show, cave paintings in India that were as old as the European ones, although burial and art have more to do with culture than intelligence. I do believe some hominids buried their dead before they were technically homo sapien.

No offense meant to Northerners, because clearly, their time DID come. If you look at the world today, the Northern barbarians have done pretty well for themselves. But their success came (like most peoples in history) from building on the knowledge and accomplishments of other civilization that came before them, not because they were particularly impressive when they first emerged on the world stage.

The original state of the Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Franks, and Vikings, makes their eventual ascent all the more surprising and impressive. But it was not cold weather and “bigger brains”that brought the North to their turn at the top, but prolonged contact with the Romans and remnants of other civilization.

In fact, when the focus of history turned to Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we see it fall into the Dark Ages for centuries before it began to emerged as a new and significant power.

It is a word that was coined by the northern barbarians later in their history, and applied exclusively to darker-skinned peoples in less developed lands and cultures. This has often lead White people to believe that their never WERE any “White savages.”
This, of course, was not the case. The problem is that White people have almost never heard that term applied to themselves or to their own forefathers.

However, when I use the word, to describe the northern barbarians, at the edges of the Roman Empire, it does not carry the same connotation because it is not meant to say that the northerners were GENETICALLY inferior. They were just living in areas poor in usable resources and isolated from the main engines of human technology and cumulative knowledge.

That is the difference between my position and Chuck’s. I don’t think that the “savages” are some genetically backward class of human being, Chuck does.

I must admit to finding it difficult to comprehend the extent of the arrogance and ignorance that compels certain people like Chuck to keep on making statements like this:

…groups that exited africa had to work both harder *and* more intelligently to survive. those that survived passed on their “survivor genes” to their descendents. the change of environment led to agriculture and writing and urbanity and philosophy and mathematics, astronomy and physics. none of those existed in africa until non-africans introduced them.

I say this because someone like Chuck actually believes – from his postings – that he is a fairly “knowledgeable” individual. Probably someone with a high IQ!!!

So I would imagine that he would probably be aware of a common philosophical logic proposition first associated with “Karl Popper” in the “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”. It goes like this…

Supposing we make a number of observations about swans and conclude because of our “existing” knowledge of swans that they all must be white …

Popper said about this:

No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

He showed how it only takes one observation of a “Black swan” to show the invalid and error inducting conclusion: “..All swans are white”

But this is precisely what Chuck has set out to do with his insistence that: “philosophy and mathematics, astronomy and physics. none of those existed in africa until non-africans introduced them.

So For Example…”Robert Temple and the Sirius Mystery”

I have always known about this connection. A West African tribe called the Dogon who believed their ancestors originated from the star system of Sirius. And that civilization on this planet was started by these ET’s.

In 1976 an astronomer – Robert Temple published a book about this Sirius connection. The information was …heavily suppressed and Robert Temple was ridiculed and threated by “unofficial” government sources. Since that time a lot of this information has been corroborated from other sources as he confirms in these interviews.

Now it may be possible to dismiss or ridicule this “ET” connection but it cannot explain how so called “primitive tribes” in Africa had detailed astronomical knowledge WAY BEFORE any white Europeans or Westerners with their enhanced “survivor genes” and “bigger brains” were able to discover this.

They knew about the existence of star systems such as Sirius A , B and C. None of these are observable without the assistance of astronomical telescope. This knowledge also allowed the astronomer Robert Temple to predict the discover of the two stars “B” and “C” before they were known to the present then astronomical community.

Now this type of information is not difficult to find and research on the Internet. Its also the reason why Karl Popper also concluded:

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories

“Now it may be possible to dismiss or ridicule this “ET” connection but it cannot explain how so called “primitive tribes” in Africa had detailed astronomical knowledge WAY BEFORE any white Europeans or Westerners with their enhanced “survivor genes” and “bigger brains” were able to discover this.”

To Kwamla’s point, you might also have a look into the mathematics of African fractal design.

I’d like to point out that the size of the brain is not as important as the convolution of the brain. Women, in general, have smaller brains that men, but nobody in their right mind is going to say that women are less intelligent than men.

But maybe I should just go outside and take a roll in the snow to increase my intelligence (yes, we already have some). I’ll be right back and post something smarter!

Indeed when Western science did discover these patterns, as the researcher says, they initially just dismissed them as “useless and insignificant”.

This is the gist of these blacks have never invented anything arguments, isn’t it? When they come across anything complex, they dismiss it as they were not ‘invented’ by whites. It puts a dent in their white superior IQ theories should they have to delve any further. They can carry on with their delusions.

@hannu: I think it is time to evoke the acient gods of the finns and shout Perkele Jumalauta, (Percunas God Help literal translation), and roll in the snow few more times before we embark to our supreme northern whiteness conquer of the world! And after we have beaten our back shining red with the vasta/vihta in the sauna, drink few more kuupallista of mead, way we go.

This, of course, is possible because we are superior and white. Actually we are very white since today there was no sun at all, only three hours of rainy grey twilight. And during this time of year we maintain our whiteness because of no sun light at all!

And King, sam is only my christian name, not my true finnish name, whihc shall be revealed only to my fellow finns, whose intellect can devulge such names. Ynjevi. 😀

It’s a looser argument. Most people forget that evolution requires millions of years to make significant changes to any species..

Well first, one should probably define evolutionary changes in terms of generations and not years… bacteria for example reproduce at a much faster rate than humans. One can induce marked changes in a strain of bacteria in less than a year.

As an example of Phenotypic change in humans is that pale skinned white people basically didn’t exist until around 5,500 years ago. The adaption was a response to dietary change (forced by population pressures..) going from a diet heavy in fish and meat to more grains. Fish and meat supplied vitamin D (a deficiency of vitamin leads to a marked rise in miscarriages…. and rickets which hinders formation of a pelvis large enough to give birth) so that when the Northern diet changed the lighter skinned people survived and the darker skinned (probably light Southern Italians..) effectively did not pass on their genes.

(Where some people still retain darker skin, such as with the Inuit in the Arctic, the people obtain significant amounts of Vitamin D from eating fish and sea mammal blubber…)

The HBD argument (basically that’s what the cold weather argument is…note I am not endorsing it) is that a combination of cold weather and a dense population are required for increased intelligence. (Dense enough to move away from hunting and gathering…)

HBD certainly has it’s racist proponents and skirts very closely to what could be called racist science but they generally acknowledge that some of the smartest groups of people in the world are not white. Parsis and Brahmins in India and the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in Northeast Asia rank higher in average intelligence to HBDers than Gentile whites.

“Well first, one should probably define evolutionary changes in terms of generations and not years… bacteria for example reproduce at a much faster rate than humans. One can induce marked changes in a strain of bacteria in less than a year.

Good point. And a very interesting article, thanks. I’ll keep that theory under advisement.

“HBD certainly has it’s racist proponents and skirts very closely to what could be called racist science but they generally acknowledge that some of the smartest groups of people in the world are not white”

There are some weird ideas being bounced around in this thread. I didn’t read every single post so I may be repeating something that was already said, but I just want to add my thoughts on the cold climate hypothesis.

This idea is largely misunderstood. That’s why whenever this concept is brought up, we get someone asking the question, “Why aren’t Inuit the smartest people on earth?” or some other variation of that.

Cold climates do not create intelligence. Cold climate is simply a selective pressure. If you had a group of 1000 people and they moved up north and the harsh weather winnowed away most of the group, leaving only the smartest alive to propagate, they aren’t going to be any smarter than they already were. Sure the average intelligence of the group will be higher, because those on the lower end don’t exist anymore to bring down the mean, but they aren’t going to turn into super geniuses.

The brain is a complex organ and there are numerous genes that affect the brain’s structure. We don’t even know all the genes that are involved in brain function. Some may increase brain size. Some may increase the number of neural connections. Some may affect glucose metabolism. They all work in tandem to allow us the ability to move, think and operate. And unless a mutation or a recombination of genes occurs that changes brain function, then the brain stays the same.

It’s most likely that mutations that changed the human brain came from areas where there were large populations. That’s because the increase in numbers creates more opportunities for new mutations. In early human prehistory, those that lived in cold climates had sparse populations. Warm climates with abundant food were the most likely regions for increases in intelligence.

Mesopotamia, the Nile Valley, the Indus Valley and other similar areas would be statistically the most favorable areas for new mutations. That doesn’t mean that a mutation couldn’t originate from a northern population. It’s just less likely. So when some point out that Egypt and Babylon were advanced civilizations that existed in warm climates, it’s really a silly point. Of course they were. But does that mean they had high average intelligence? That’s really the question that should be asked. What were the pressures that would remove deleterious gene combinations from the gene pool of those populations?

That’s where the cold climate hypothesis comes in. It simply suggests that a group moved into colder areas with individuals that already possessed higher intelligence and the harsh climate killed off those not suited for a lifestyle that required long term planning and higher visual-spatial skills. It just about changing averages.

I am curious. As you are a person of Thai ancestry who is a believer in HBD ideas, how does the average IQ of Thailand (91) sit with you?
Does it not rankle you at all that according to HBD theory, your people are genetically below par in the IQ department?
And does it not strike you as odd that despite their genetic closeness to the Chinese, Thais are about 10 IQ points below the Chinese?

I ask because it kinda strikes me as odd that you believe what you believe.

All things being equal ANY existential crisis achieves the same result, meaning that cold temps are no more helpful to winnowing populations than extremely warm and arid ones.

Secondly, it is incorrect to assume that those who survive in crisis always have higher I.Q.s. It may turn out to be those with better blood circulation, or those who can haul more wood, or hunt more meat. Because intelligence (as much as we idolize it) is not always the primary factor in survival.

Years ago I used to be bothered by the idea that Thais had a lower IQ than northern Asians. But the facts are the facts and I dealt with it. The IQ numbers come from the Thai government themselves and not some outside group, so it’s not as if I could point the finger at others.

Even though Thais don’t have the highest IQ, I still love Thai people and have never been ashamed of being Thai(though I consider myself American first and foremost). My brother isn’t so bright, but never in my life has his intelligence been a factor in my feelings for him. This is the way I feel about most everybody. I speak about HBD as a matter of fact. Not because I have a beef with others or am looking to tear somebody down. It’s not about what I want to believe, but what I see as being true.

As to your question about the discrepancies in IQ between Thais and Chinese, I don’t find it odd at all. The difference is about the same as between Greeks and Germans. It is what it is.

Secondly, it is incorrect to assume that those who survive in crisis always have higher I.Q.s. It may turn out to be those with better blood circulation, or those who can haul more wood, or hunt more meat. Because intelligence (as much as we idolize it) is not always the primary factor in survival.

I was only speaking in regards to the cold climate hypothesis. Of course cold weather is not the only selective pressure on a population and higher intelligence is not the only adaptation to every pressure. The traits that get passed on are those that are beneficial for survival. It may be higher intelligence or any other trait. Maybe a freak mutation could’ve made humans furry and they’d survive the cold that way. Evolution is random.

“The change in genetic composition of a population over successive generations, which may be caused by natural selection, inbreeding, hybridization, or mutation.”

Wikipedia’s definition (since I am lazy..)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
“Evolution (also known as biological, genetic or organic evolution) is the change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms through successive generations. This change results from interactions between processes that introduce variation into a population, and other processes that remove it. As a result, variants with particular traits become more, or less, common. A trait is a particular characteristic—anatomical, biochemical or behavioural—that is the result of gene–environment interaction.”

Seriously, we had to take IQ tests in the army (mandatory national service) and since nobody wanted stay longer than they had to, everybody tried to fix the results as low as possible without getting caught in the act. Higher the score, more surely you ended up in the officers training and three more months service. So…

Well, lets just say that the officer in charge the tests was not amused by the results and we got some extra activities out doors as a result. But he told us that now we had to live with the results for the rest of our lives, so I assume somewhere in some archive there are number of IQ tests that prove that at least one group on finnish conscripts were a amazingly dumb :-D.

I also know a person, who now runs his own hi tech company and is internationally recognized computer security expert, and he never graduated from high school. He was also sent to some tests because his poor performance at school and the IQ tests revealed lower than average intellect. He was also absent from school so much that the authorities were considering to send him to the “special” school for “special” children. 😀

Well, since he was in trouble all the time, they gave him his papers and kicked him out and the principal even told him, that in twenty years he’ll be either dead or in nut house. Thirty years later he is much more richer and successfull than any of his old school mates or the principal. The reason: he was more interested in computers than school as a kid and could not care less about the school or IQ tests. Lesson here is: don’t read too much on these tests :-D.

When ever somebody is trying to construct some kind of value system based on race or qualities based on race, that is racism. You can hide behind some pseudo science such as HBD, but in the end of the day that is what you are: a racist. The only purpose of these things is to construct some kind of racial system, this race is more intelligent than this, and for what? That is the real question.

Tha nazis had their own theories on it, but nobody takes them too seriously today. After all the real aryans are iranians and some north western indians, pakistanis etc., not some six two tall blonde fancy looking male models from Klaufenberg Bavaria. This HBD is same kind of horse manure.

All things being equal ANY existential crisis achieves the same result, meaning that cold temps are no more helpful to winnowing populations than extremely warm and arid ones.

**

Africa and its warm and arid climate were the default position. As Sagat said, the cold weather hypothesis is wildly misunderstood. The most important impetus was moving out of Africa. Everything else cascaded from that.

Africans had no impetus for their brains to evolve as they had their environment “figured out”. Call this the “Mario Bros. Theory of Human Evolution” if you like. They didn’t, or rather their genes didn’t, need to develop new strategies in order to get by.

“I was only speaking in regards to the cold climate hypothesis. Of course cold weather is not the only selective pressure on a population and higher intelligence is not the only adaptation to every pressure. The traits that get passed on are those that are beneficial for survival. It may be higher intelligence or any other trait.”

Exactly. It is important not to conflate survival to intelligence because in many scenarios dumb people who have other adaptive advantages do survive. THEREFORE, The assumption that the applied selective pressures of cold temperature always result in heightened INTELLIGENCE, is cherry picking the particular survival trait that you desire. It may be as simply as strong dumb people who are hairier.

Africa and its warm and arid climate were the default position. As Sagat said, the cold weather hypothesis is wildly misunderstood. The most important impetus was moving out of Africa. Everything else cascaded from that.

Africans had no impetus for their brains to evolve as they had their environment “figured out”.

So then, because your forefathers live on a large continent, that means that they have FIGURED OUT the entire environment before you were born?

1) They figured out the massive desserts,
2) They figured out the teeming population of large predators, that were still a challenge thousands of years later.
3) They figured out all the agricultural challenges
4) They figured out jungle survival
5) Mountain Survival
6) Disease control and treatment
7) Typhoons, volcanoes, floods, wildfires

Yes, NONE of these things exerted the slightest pressure that forced Africans to evolve. Since they were born on the African continent, they were naturally immune to all of those challenges, because Africans do not grow more intelligent by solving African problems. -they were already “figured out.”

Only people who moved into a colder climate with far fewer large predators, and with less varied climate regions were challenged to evolve.

Seriously, my concern is not with these HBD ‘theories’, per se. After all opinions are like a**holes, everyone’s got one. My concerns is what these HBD adherents, propose to do with these theories. This sounds like Eugenics to me. For example, how would it effect public policy etc? As history shows, such views can lead to genocide.

I’m more or the mind that false theories should be challenged at their source of false assumption. Without an operational theory upon which to base their biases, it becomes more difficult to take ANY meaningful action.

People like Chuck and Sailer must be kept at the lunatic fringe, where they belong. Of course, they will always have some deluded adherents, but so long as their theories are exposed to the obvious and simple truth, they will not get far with them.

As for the intent of the HBDers, it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that no matter what they intend… their false science will result in further racial prejudice and unfair stereotypes, rationalizations, and categorization.

“I also know a person, who now runs his own hi tech company and is internationally recognized computer security expert, and he never graduated from high school. He was also sent to some tests because his poor performance at school and the IQ tests revealed lower than average intellect. He was also absent from school so much that the authorities were considering to send him to the “special” school for “special” children.”

Great points, Sam! …or whatever your real name is 🙂 Yrvilindikin!??

Yeah, I don’t get that people don’t seem to understand how complex and idea intelligence is.

1) How long it takes you to grasp any given truth – which is often seen as a major part of being smart.

2) The kind of concepts that you are most adept at comprehending, because most people specialize in this regard.

3) The overall variety and scope of diversity of concepts that you comprehend.

4) The effective application of knowledge, once acquired.

5) The ability to communicate concepts to others in a way that they can most easily understand them.

All of these things are also applicable to our valuation of overall intelligence, but ALL of them are certainly not always tested for.

Add to that the fact that tenacity and self-motivation is a very BIG part of applied intelligence. If a person is good at solving Rubik’s Cubes and playing Three-Dimensional Chess, but is a lazy bones, who prefers to live in his mother’s basement, jobless, eating Pop Tarts and Top Ramen, is that really an “intelligent person?” And if so, by who’s standards?

The basic point is that intelligence is notoriously difficult to quantify. It’s an extremely complicated idea, that is near impossible to assess based on any given test.

Interesting post. I had never heard any of this. IQ measures something. In my experience what it measures doesn’t seem to have much to do with common sense or the kind of “human” skills that are a necessary part of any successful society. For example, I’ve been involved at various times, in a busines context, with a few MENSA members. In know this because they seem to always want to remind you that they are MENSA members. Mostly I’ve found them to be misanthropic at least, and often obessissve to the point of being sociopathic — certainly not the kind of individuals, in general, that one wants to have to rely on in a social or family setting.

what do you think people could possibly do with belief in HBD in this democracy with this much white guilt roaming around?

as for me (and I think Sailer), i just want to eradicate the egalitarian goals and ideals that we the people use to gauge black achievement. the achievement gap is *partly* a function of lower IQ. throwing money after educational achievement for blacks continues to prove ineffective.

Stop wasting so much money on trying to educate Black people, because it’s just throwing money down the drain.”

So I thought, I just wanted to clarify their operational goals instead of just them pontificating on their beliefs.

what do you think people could possibly do with belief in HBD in this democracy with this much white guilt roaming around

What white guilt? There isn’t much. Those whites, who are introspective, when it comes to racism, are few and far between. I can count on my fingers those that I have come across. What do you propose they do with these inferior IQ people in regards to public policy?

Stop wasting so much money on trying to educate Black people, because it’s just throwing money down the drain.
Just as I thought! A racist hiding under the cloak of pseudo-science!

certainly not the kind of individuals, in general, that one wants to have to rely on in a social or family setting.

Is it “racist” to simply disagree with the way taxpayer monies are being spent wrt education? I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that Black folk are indeed, on average, less intelligent than Whites or Asians – should we then continue to spend large amounts of taxpayer money on inner city schools, knowing that the majority of the kids there are not able to achieve parity with their White and Asian peers?

What are we to say of the fact that, as the late John Ogbu noted, even the children of the solidly Black middle and upper middle classes, tend to score lower on tests than do lower class and poorer Whites and Asians? do we just ignore his findings and accuse anyone who suggests cognitive differences between the races a “racist” a priori?

See, this is where folks on the Left – and from what I’ve been gathering based on your comments here and your blog, I would say you’re definitely on that side of the political aisle – has to come to grips with its own biases. I don’t think it does the HBD debate any good for the Left not to honestly grapple with these questions, and indeed may only serve to ngin up support for the HBD side.

Now, I agree with you, when you want to know what point the HBDers are trying to make; like you, I too want to know and explore the actual public policy changes they would support and want to see passed. I agree with you that Eugenics, which is what the HBDers most definitely support, would fail, as it has always failed. In every nation its been tried, including Singapore, it has failed miserably – and, as I’ve noted before on another thread here at Abagond’s, the HBDers either never gave much thought to, or they have deliberately refused to take up how they intend to increase the number of Smart White People, and in order to do that, you have to convince White Women with Options, to forego attending prestigious unis, have high prestige and high paying careers, not live in places like NYC, and agree to have babies, at say 21 or so, with Jeremey the STEM Guy. Uh, good luck with that, because so long as we live in a free society, there is no way in hell you’re going to be able to make such an option attractive to many young ladies.

“Is it “racist” to simply disagree with the way taxpayer monies are being spent wrt education? I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that Black folk are indeed, on average, less intelligent than Whites or Asians – should we then continue to spend large amounts of taxpayer money on inner city schools, knowing that…”

You see, Hernieth, this is what I was trying to tell you above. As long as these dullards think that they have some kind of workable “scientific” theory… no matter how many times it has been utterly disproved above, in this very thread… there will always be people who argue about the allocation of resources, based on those spurious arguments.

Black Americans are not even 13% of the U.S. population. Even at that, they are dreadfully underrepresented in the Advanced Academy based on their population size.

How much tax money do you think is really “wasted” on Black people’s education, as a percentage of the total annual education budget? Not very much, comparatively, I assure you.

It’s not really about “wasting money,” the money spent on Black education would be a minor earmark tagged onto the back end of an insignificant farm bill. The money is insignificant when compared to the whole. The real problem is hate.

I have to agree with you King. The money being spent on public education in this country is paltry compared to Social Security, Defense, and paying interest on the national debt. (By the way, shout out to my man Dubya for adding some extra billions to it for us!)

So even if Chuck and/or Obsidian want to say that using taxpayer money to fund education for Black people in America is a waste, then what about the wasted money trying to stabilize countries like Iraq and Afghanistan with our military? Wouldn’t that be a waste of money on people who (for the sake of argument) are less intelligent because of their race?

See you can tell how racist these views really are by the lack of consistency in their views when it comes to dealing with reality. Sure, less money to Black kids in school in America, but keep the cash-flow going for bombs blowing up Brown kids in the Middle East. While these aren’t necessarily the views of Chuck or Obsidian, that questions like these aren’t discussed in tandem with their beliefs is very telling to me.

When it comes to public policy, HBD’s scientific racism is going to fail as much as slavery (and attempts to justify it) failed. Pardon the dramatics, but would anyone expect members of any race to accept decisions influenced by racism? (No matter how “scientific” its conclusions are based on.) We’d have another civil war. No doubt.

Also, this issue is not a fight between Left or Right. Indeed, Conservatives condemn HBDers like Steve Sailer as much as the Left does. It’s sad that American politics always comes down to a choice between Right or Left, because people’s political views are so much more complex than that. But when it comes to race, I’d like to see more bi-partisanship and less showmanship by Democrats or Republicans (especially the Republicans these days, oy vey) trying to win talking-points with talking-heads full of empty words.

I understand the need to grant HBD its premise for the sake of argument and get a sense of where they want to go in terms of public policy and the real world applications of HBD. However, Im having a hard time granting that premise because the foundation for it is faulty to begin with.

Its a huge leap to give the benefit of the doubt to a concept as tenacious as HBD.

I have to agree with you King. The money being spent on public education in this country is paltry compared to Social Security, Defense, and paying interest on the national debt.

School districts had total expenditures of approximately $562.3 billion in 2006–07, including about $476.8 billion in current expenditures for public elementary and secondary education. Of the remaining expenditures, $62.9 billion was spent on capital outlay, $14.7 billion on interest payments on debt, and $7.8 billion on other programs (programs such as community services and adult education, which are not a part of public elementary and secondary education).

$562 billion per year is not paltry (and is $100 billion less than US defense expenditures at a time when the US is fighting two wars…) Adjusted for inflation, US defense expenditures in (pre wars) 2000 were $100 billion less than the money for public education spent at the primary and secondary levels. (This does not cover college or trade schools…)

How that money is being spent and if it it being spent properly (on people of any race..) is another debate.

“So even if Chuck and/or Obsidian want to say that using taxpayer money to fund education for Black people in America is a waste, then what about the wasted money trying to stabilize countries like Iraq and Afghanistan with our military? Wouldn’t that be a waste of money on people who (for the sake of argument) are less intelligent because of their race?”

I totally agree.

Notice that the problem is not wasting money on educating ALL “dumb people” in America, of every race. They don’t want to weed out ALL of the academically challenged people—they want to focus instead on a single race. Black people.

Ask yourself why no other race was mentioned?

This is the pathology of HBD—It’s the same old Klan of Ku Kluxers, this time pulling their hoods over their lab coats. All of this rubbish science about how cold weather is better for evolution than hot/dry weather etc. is just a facade. And who are the true targets of all of this? who are the wastrels? Who are the phantom menace?

Zek,
Well, I’m glad you didn’t lump me in with those who are actually arguing the case I questioned Hereneith about; I wasn’t in agreement with it, just asking her some probing questions.

See, I don’t think its necessarily “racist” to ask whether public monies are being used in a responsible fashion wrt the public education system, particularly in inner city school areas where Black folks are the majority. Nor do I think it necessarily fair to interject the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan into said conversation. I think both issues can stand or fall on their own merits or the lack thereof; emotional appeals one to another aren’t necessary, and plays right into the hands of those who are fervent HBDers.

My position on the matter is simple: so what if Black folks, in aggregate, are less intelligent than Whites? Now what – do we deny them basic civil liberties? Do we circumvent the Constitution under the grounds that Blacks are more prone toward violence and criminal behavior? Let’s say we do away with Affirmative Action once and for all – on what grounds are we to assume that high quality, individual Blacks would indeed be given a fair shake?

And indeed, as I think it was King rightly noted above, what are we to do with the millions of Dumb White People – or, are they simply not as bad a concern as putatively Dumb Black ones? And then there’s the elephant in the middle of the room – how do we increase the number of Smart White People – a measure that would require somehow getting White Women with Options, to not only forego prestigious lifestyles and educations, but to mate at early ages (early 20s at least) with Jeremy the STEM Guy. Please notice how the HBDers never seem to get around to this when they speak of “Eugenics”.

See, this is where I want to engage the HBDers – I’m willing to grant them carte blanche on their theories, even concedet that they have some good points (like the fact that inner cities spend ridiculous amounts of money per pupil in the public schools with precious little to show for it) – but I want to get at them on the public policy level. Because, in engaging them in such a conversation, it reveals that they really do want to use HBD to change or otherwise influence public policy, and in exactly what way. I want to show everyone just how exactly UN-American the HBDers truly are; because at their core, they do not uphold American ideals or beliefs. They indeed, believe in Monarchy, instead of a divine rule of kings, theirs is the “Scientific” rule of the Cognitive Elites.

Those who’ve known me for some time will know well my views on HBD, and more importantly my views on those who are its biggest promulgators. I give them no quarter.

See, she’s a tax burden with low IQ who’s unattractive and has no hope of getting a White man so she better stop complaining and man-up like Black men because her hair needs a relaxer like Liberals need to stop whining about social services and more about the terrorists taking over Amurka through that Mosque pretending to be a cultural center that the little girl was going on a field-trip to until protesters thought her scarf was a burqa and told her to go back to Africa/The Middle East because illegal immigrants are taking our jobs for $5.45 an hour picking fruit that the little girl would eat for lunch, except her family ran out of food-stamps in the recession/job-less recovery and we don’t need to spend more money on lazy people in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods when obviously Steve Sailer should be president and give Black people moral guidance from his White marble peak of Whiteness where the little girl could look up at him and say, “Mommy, why is that White man on the roof again?”

And the mom would say, “Because he’s crazy baby. Now eat your vegetables.”

At least, that’s what I get when I read through some of the comments here ; )

I think some of you try to divert from having an honest discussion about human differences when you throw out accusations of racism. The cry of “racism!” is really a shaming tactic meant to silence debate. It really only works on those that feel ashamed of their beliefs. For me, at least, it amounts to calling someone a big meanie.

I also think the assertions that human biological differences is somehow a pseudo-science are funny. What really is a pseudo-science is blank slatism. The ideas of blank slaters only work if you assume that somehow human beings are immune from basic rules of biology. People like Jared Diamond peddle junk science and because of ideological reasons, some people eat it up. Gun Germs and Steel has some good ideas but the man lays out his politicized motivations for the book in the first chapter. He even states plainly that he believes Papuans are smarter than Europeans. If he said the opposite, most of you would dismiss his writings outright.

Notice that the problem is not wasting money on educating ALL “dumb people” in America, of every race. They don’t want to weed out ALL of the academically challenged people—they want to focus instead on a single race. Black people.

I see this claim made a lot. “You all just hate Black people!” Some do. That’s no fault of science. That some would use information about human differences to belittle Blacks doesn’t make the information false. I’ll be honest and say that probably a good portion of those that discuss human differences have at least some racial animosity towards Blacks, but that doesn’t mean everyone does and as I said, that doesn’t make the facts any less true.

There are human differences. Since we’re not all clones, it’s to be expected that populations vary in frequency of traits. It’s statistically impossible that all groups around the world are exactly the same in every way. Even from town to town, averages will vary. Take 100 people and then tell them to split into two random groups and you’ll find the averages for height, weight, intelligence and various other qualities will not be equal between the two groups. There always has and there will always be variation within groups and between groups. This is not a shocking or crazy idea. It’s basic science.

“My position on the matter is simple: so what if Black folks, in aggregate, are less intelligent than Whites? Now what – do we deny them basic civil liberties? Do we circumvent the Constitution under the grounds that Blacks are more prone toward violence and criminal behavior?”

Again, that’s a big concession to make when ALL of the evidence is pointing in the exact opposite direction.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are based on the ideas that all men were created equal. If you accept that Some humans were born as intellectual inferiors, then why not amend the Constitution? Your “rights” are supposed upon your equal standing with all other men. When you are willing to concede that equality, then prepare yourself to surrender your “rights” as well.

But, as I said… why even consider that when it’s OBVIOUS that HBD is for dummies.

I actually started writing a post about that on my blog. It should be up tomorrow. Please check back then and we’ll have a discussion about it. Your questions about public polices were actually the catalyst for me taking it up, so I want to discuss it with you.

We can talk about it more here too, if you feel this is a more neutral ground. I just cracked open a bottle, so I’ll be off the rest of the night. See ya then.

King,
With all due respect, I find your approach to be somewhat counterproductive, although I certainly understand where its coming from. Bugt you have to do a better job of reigning in your emotions here.

Autistic people, for example, clearly are not “equal” to people who aren’t so; but they suffer no reductions in their basic rights as American citizens. We can apply the same reasoning here to the HBD debate/question. Even if it could be proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Blacks on average were less intelligent than Whites or Asians, it still wouldn’t change the fact that Blacks are American citizens, and as such must be accorded the same rights and freedoms as their putatively cognitive betters. The HBDers want to change public policy, much of which would really hinge on changing the fundaments of our society and the ideals on which it is based.

Btw, have you ever read any of Pinker’s work, and/or seen him speak/give interviews? I have, and have found him quite interesting.

@ sagat: I find it extremely funny, as a white northern heterosexual male, that you are saying this:

“I think some of you try to divert from having an honest discussion about human differences when you throw out accusations of racism. The cry of “racism!” is really a shaming tactic meant to silence debate. It really only works on those that feel ashamed of their beliefs.”

I have no idea how high your score in IQ tests was, I never took one after the army ones which we blew, but somehow it does not give too bright impression of you when you complain that nasty derailers are shouting RACISM when you just want to discuss about racial differences. See, sagat, that is racisist. 😀

Yeap. If and when you have an idea that humanbeings are divided into different spieces, races, you are a racist. Because, from the biological point of view, there is only one human spieces in this world. Shockin, isn’t it? But alas, it is true. You and the black guy (with lover IQ than what you have :-D) are more similar than anything else in this planet.

All these different races are not biological. You have practically similar biology in your body as the most scary lookin aborginal you can find. I know, it can really ruin your day to realize this, but hey, I did not create this humanbeing. Blame God! Why he did so lowsy job that he made us one? I have no idea, but it really spoils all this race jibberish for real. From the science point of view that is. 😀

I find it ridicilous that here we have guys, educated I guess, who are trying to find something that would explain their racism for the better. I prefer good ole KKK style racists who just say “I hate everybody” and don’t make any excuses at all. At least they are honest.

Guys who try to find “scientific proof” for their racist beliefs are sorry bunch of whiners who are too scared to say who they are and try to find a pacifier for their nagging thoughts. At least thats what I think, but hey, I am way below the average in the IQ tests so I might be wrong here! 😀

I find it amazing you guys don’t seem to pick up on how united you both are in your MAIN view points !!!:

King

Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are based on the ideas that all men were created equal. If you accept that Some humans were born as intellectual inferiors, then why not amend the Constitution? Your “rights” are supposed upon your equal standing with all other men. When you are willing to concede that equality, then prepare yourself to surrender your “rights” as well.

and…

theobsidianfiles

Even if it could be proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that Blacks on average were less intelligent than Whites or Asians, it still wouldn’t change the fact that Blacks are American citizens, and as such must be accorded the same rights and freedoms as their putatively cognitive betters.

Could it be any more obvious?

As I’ve said before. Both approaches each of you take towards challenging the HBDers are valid. And neither approach needs to invalidate the others. From my perspective they are actually complimentary.

I don’t read any of these HBDers arguing for your main view points.

A common indication as SAM points out that they are arguing from a less than egalitarian point of view.

So far example SAGAT will make a statement like:

Take 100 people and then tell them to split into two random groups and you’ll find the averages for height, weight, intelligence and various other qualities will not be equal between the two groups. There always has and there will always be variation within groups and between groups. This is not a shocking or crazy idea. It’s basic science.

Of course its “…basic science” we all know and agree that “intelligence” can be measured in the same non-problematic way as height and weight.

If and when you have an idea that humanbeings are divided into different spieces, races, you are a racist. Because, from the biological point of view, there is only one human spieces in this world.

Species and race are not the same thing. If that’s the basis for your argument then you’ve failed. You can call me a racist for acknowledging that race exists. Doesn’t bother me. Practically everyone in the world knows there’s different races. Since this thread is about race, then it must be a racist too, huh?

A common indication as SAM points out that they are arguing from a less than egalitarian point of view.

Yes, I’m not an egalitarian. It’s no secret.

Of course its “…basic science” we all know and agree that “intelligence” can be measured in the same non-problematic way as height and weight.

Ok. I should’ve used the word IQ. Since the definition of intelligence seems to be subjective and cannot be agreed upon, of course we can’t measure it in any way that would satisfy the conflicting views of what intelligence actually is. It’s much like the idea of beauty. Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder.

“Both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are based on the ideas that all men were created equal. If you accept that Some humans were born as intellectual inferiors, then why not amend the Constitution?

Was, in actually, in response to obsidian’s statements above along the same vein.

I really don’t object to his getting to the root of the policy goals of HBD, I just wish he could do it without blanket acceptance of their claims. The problem seems to be (and O. can correct me if I’m wrong) that he has read or listened to a lot of HBD stuff himself, and has not the wherewithal to refute it. He doesn’t understand WHY it is wrong, and because of his own inability to challenge their viewpoint, he retreats into Chamberlainesque acceptance and negotiation.

Obsidian himself (as I read him) is a Black HBD believer who now hopes that the U.S. Constitution will still protect his inferiority (or that of his race) from the consequences to his beliefs.

I think raci…HBDers like to confuse/blur the sociological concept of race with the biological one. The latter cannot be scientifically proved. I’m a 100% layman but I understand that no (real) biologist or anthropologist approves the concept of “race” as it is understood by HBDers.

Race is just a subdivision of a species. It’s synonymous with sub-species, though we never really say race when talking about animals.

From a medical dictionary:

a : a category in biological classification that ranks immediately below a species and designates a population of a particular geographical region genetically distinguishable from other such populations of the same species and capable of interbreeding successfully with them where its range overlaps theirsb: a named subdivision (as a race or variety) of a species

By that definition, humans meet the criteria to be partitioned into different races. We know that human populations cluster into geographical regions genetically. We’ve longed known that humans are morphologically different along a continuum across geographic regions.

Yes, I know that humans are lumped into one subspecies, homo sapien sapiens, but this clearly goes against the very definition of subspecies. There’s long been a debate about this among taxonomists with disagreements about where to draw the lines as some groups, like Somalis for example, don’t fit neatly into the broader categories of race, but according to the definition, this is to be expected. Much of this has to do with giving special exception to humans with regards to biological standards. I call this homo-centrism, because let’s face it: despite our disagreements, in the end we’re all specists.

I think raci…HBDers like to confuse/blur the sociological concept of race with the biological one. The latter cannot be scientifically proved. I’m a 100% layman but I understand that no (real) biologist or anthropologist approves the concept of “race” as it is understood by HBDers.</i

That's not true. There's about a 50/50 split among anthropologists and biologists regarding the concept of race. Most have move towards using the term, population groups, because it's not as loaded of a term. There's no question that groups from around the world have different biological features. It's really just semantics at this point. Maybe in the future, you'll call us populationists as a derogatory term.

Hm. I’m sort of cautious about your 50/50 statement. Often people with your kind of agenda count in non-reliable scientist with a similar agenda.

But, yes of course there are apparent physical differences. I don’t believe that eye- or skin color affect people’s intelligence. Only if you are able to prove that their brain is decidedly different, I think you have a case.

Another question, in trying to understand your position on race. Can you name any races, or define a specific race?

When I speak about Black people or White people, I’m just using shorthand to speak about generally understood ideas of physical differences. Hannu is right in that I do often conflate biological concepts and sociological concepts of race. I’m aware that I do it and I do it out of convenience for the conversation.

Just to be clear. There is no such thing as a Black or White race. When I say Black, I’m generally referring to those of West African descent. There’s a lot of diversity in Africa and I don’t consider Mbuti pygmies or San Bushmen to be the same race as West Africans, because I think they’re distinct peoples. In genetic population clusters, they are more closely related to each other than they are to northeast Asians, but they’re different enough that I think they should be recognized as so. Though my position can be argued as simply a differences in semantics as well.

But that’s the problem right there! I’ve heard of italian/spanish men who have complained that when coming to Finland they were seen/treated like black people! Granted, that was more like a decade ago, but if not even Europeans who (by god’s grace), are überfantastic, white rulers of the earth, cannot decide amongst themselves what is white, what is not!!!! It is an extremely sliding scale.

And I’ve also heard that Finns are considered to be a “mongrel race” by hardcore german “aryans”. LOL! I don’t even care…

Notice that the problem is not wasting money on educating ALL “dumb people” in America, of every race. They don’t want to weed out ALL of the academically challenged people—they want to focus instead on a single race. Black people.

Nah, that’s not it.

It’s just that black people are the largest cohort identified by a commonality: blackness.

Blacks themselves focus on the plight of black education and seek remedies that only apply to blacks. Case in point – one of many – is a recent study which was also reported on by CNN which explored the education gap between blacks and whites. The success or failure of education was analyzed solely based upon the level of the gap. In fact, in school districts where blacks overtook whites in terms of graduation rates, the problem was considered “fixed” and the results celebrated. The community organizers who are active on this front don’t care about education. They care about group politics.

So if they are going to vie for tax money to fix this problem of low black educational achievement, you’re damn right I’m going to view this issue through that dichotomous lens. If black community organizers and black academics are going to say, “look, look, we have a problem with *black* kids’ education that needs to be addressed”, I and other HBDers are going to step in and add some perspective to the issue.

The problem may not be money or racism. The problem could be endogenous.

Its questionable intelligence (or level of IQ)– in my view – to be focusing on that 0.1% rather than an acceptance and supportability of the 99.9% commonality between peoples.

LOL! 😆 “You’re a big dummy because of what you think!” Love that argument. It always comes after,”You’re a racist!” Same bag of tricks. Next you’ll call me an evil nazi.

Men and women are also 99.9 percent alike. So why would anyone examine or be interested in the their differences? Anyone that talks about those differences must be mouth breathing sexists! Tampons are a tool of the oppressor! We are all the same. 🙂

If black community organizers and black academics are going to say, “look, look, we have a problem with *black* kids’ education that needs to be addressed”, I and other HBDers are going to step in and add some perspective to the issue.

And what perspective would that be? Racism?? C’mon now…

Group politics is nothing new. And to take it as some kind of slight is to ignore the long history and continuing efforts of White group politics in our country, as well as how we are all complicit in it. Just look at the Tea Party.

But that doesn’t shouldn’t stop helping kids who aren’t getting an education to get one, no matter what group they’re from.

(However, I do agree that White men in this country have lots of issues that get ignored by the media, by politics, by our culture due to White men’s history as being the oppressor not the oppressed. And I’d support groups like MRA’s and the False Rape Society, and male abuse shelters, and lobbyists against prison rape, prostate cancer, etc., to address issues that affect men, white, black, or whatever.)

As for the biological/sociological issues about race. Let me say definitively: race as a biological category DOES NOT exist. It does exist sociologically, culturally, politically, psychologically, etc. But biologically it DOES NOT! Sorry, but it just doesn’t. It really doesn’t. No matter how many times HBDers try to say so, it does’t. No matter what arguments you can come up with, science has proven time and again that race in homo-sapiens does not exist biologically.

I mean, I could keep going down the line of just what I find on Google, but that’d be a waste of time. Every major scientific study in the past half-century has shown that race is not a biological, nor a genetic category, not even a sub-sub-species.

So if the HBDers want to keep that single issue on the table, then I’m gonna have to ask a la Forrest Gump…

“When I speak about Black people or White people, I’m just using shorthand to speak about generally understood ideas of physical differences. Hannu is right in that I do often conflate biological concepts and sociological concepts of race. I’m aware that I do it and I do it out of convenience for the conversation.”

“When I say Black, I’m generally referring to those of West African descent. There’s a lot of diversity in Africa and I don’t consider Mbuti pygmies or San Bushmen to be the same race as West Africans, because I think they’re distinct peoples. In genetic population clusters, they are more closely related to each other than they are to northeast Asians…”

I was wondering the same thing myself. What is it that you’re after? Segregation/separation/juxtaposition/justification? For what reasons? I can only assume, but I hope you yourself honestly tell us what you’re after, what kind of satisfaction this kind of approach offers to you?

I believe some people are unable to grasp humankind without labeling them and putting them in boxes. That there must be some kind of biological or divine taxonomic order of things, instead of “chaos”.

I’ve heard of italian/spanish men who have complained that when coming to Finland they were seen/treated like black people! Granted, that was more like a decade ago, but if not even Europeans who (by god’s grace), are überfantastic, white rulers of the earth, cannot decide amongst themselves what is white, what is not!!!! It is an extremely sliding scale.

The same goes for East Asians as well. Thais are often lumped in with northeast Asians but don’t say that to a Japanese unless you want an earful about Japanese superiority to Thais.

You’re right about the sliding scale thing. All humans are related to one another and there is just varying degrees of separation between groups. That’s really were the arguments come in about labeling, because no one can decide on dividing lines. And there really are no dividing lines, just a continuum of relatedness.

That doesn’t mean that we should ignore differences between groups. They exist, just like the spectrum of colors exist. I understand why many feel uncomfortable talking about our differences, considering history, but I don’t think pretending we are all alike is being honest.

It just keeps on sliding and sliding…it’s just like evolution: there is no INTERMEDIATERY “race” or human “species” to be found in the human genome. It’s still mixing and evolving.

There’s many disagreements about species classifications. Does that mean that species doesn’t exist either? All labels are just constructs. It’s just humans’ way of understanding the world around them.

I had a friend that used to argue with me that colors were just a social construct. He’d tell me that I only saw the color yellow because I was raised to think that way. He’d tried to convince me that yellow might actually be blue and I was just conditioned to believe that it wasn’t. I responded that Japanese have a different culture and they saw yellow too. And then he’d say, “Yellow is not a Japanese word. So they see whatever color their word for it is.” We’d argue about this for hours. These conversations here remind a lot of that. 🙂

This kind of conversation always reminds of a book I read a while ago, namely “The Master Plan. Himmler’s scholars and the Holocaust” by Heather Pringle.

You probably have heard of the “Ahnenerbe”, Himmler’s “brain”child, a special branch of the SS, that was devoted in searching evidence of the existence of the Aryan race, who he thought was the predecessor of ALL high cultures on this planet (Indian Jones featured exactly these guys). So finally, because aryans couldn’t have evolved from any lesser races, he thought that aryans simply must’ve descended from heavens above!!! Leap of faith, indeed!

He also thought that Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir, was some kind of electro-magnetic weapon (FOR REAL!!). But that’s actually a very good sci-fi premise, hmmm…

The term “race” conceptualizes the idea of people who are closely genetically related. There is grey area at the margins, but there is a giant middle black or white area where people of those groups have genetic maps more similar to each other than people of those other groups.

If you look at those maps on the links I provided, you’ll see that sub-saharan africans are clustered together in terms of genotopic principal component analysis. “Black race” is a sociological construction to give a name to something that has a biological root.

And this whole idea that Africans are more genetically diverse among each other does not overturn the argument for higher IQ among non-blacks. People of African descent could still be diverse among themselves but still not have experienced the novel environments that forged higher IQ in those groups that migrated out of Africa.

So as I said above: black activists and liberal politians are using “black” success as a litmus test for the success of social programs and the eradication of racism. Those people don’t even try to differentiate between black individuals; they are forcing us to observe group outcomes. Therefore, this becomes a group discussion. And if it is a group discussion, reviewing scientific research of *group* characteristics is not a racist endeavor.

“The term “race” conceptualizes the idea of people who are closely genetically related. There is grey area at the margins, but there is a giant middle black or white area where people of those groups have genetic maps more similar to each other than people of those other groups.”

How many times do I have to post the same information before you will actually read it?

You see, it turns out that Africa is the most genetically diverse place in the world and has extreme hyper genetic diversity.

But how genetically different are Africans peoples from one another? Genetics researcher Stephan Schuster conducted a survey that sequenced the genome of five people native to the region of southern Africa, including anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The other four subjects were Bushmen, one named Gubi who had his entire genome sequenced.

“Gubi is the first person from an African minority population to be fully sequenced, and comparing him to the other three men from the region shows as much genetic separation as you’d expect to find between European and Asian peoples. Says Schuster: “This is despite the fact that they sometimes live within walking distance of one another”

So, basically between Bushmen and Bantu, you can find more genetic variation that you can find between say… Han Chinese and Frenchmen. Blacks are not one massive genetic race, who is somehow genetically advantaged or disadvantaged in the same way. In reality, they are quite a few, genetically different dark-skinned races.

That’s interesting about the Bushmen. I always thought Africa was a fascinating place with it’s variety of phenotypes. I’ve never read that claim about there being more distance between two Bushmen than there is between a European and an Asian. I’m not familiar with that blog or its author so I’m hesitant to put much stock in that. I’d like to see another source. The population clusters produced from the Human Genome Project show all sub-Saharan Africans grouping together.

I think what gets lost on some with these genetic studies is that often times SNPs are used to compare relatedness, but most of these SNPs are on the non-coding region of the DNA. I think what really matters is the coding region since that’s what determines our physical features. Africans are bound to have much more genetic diversity because they build up “noise” on the non-coding region of their DNA because they come from much older populations. I’ve read elsewhere that their genetic diversity is overblown because of the focus on non-coding SNPs.

But if you wish to google “African Genetic Diversity”, you will discover that it is a BROADLY accepted fact, by the vast majority of geneticists worldwide.

Again, these are geneticists, not Physicists (Steve Hsu) not Marketing majors (Steve Sailer) Do you really think that the majority of GENETICISTS are misreading Single Nucleotide Polymorphism and reporting it to be true genetic variation, because I think that if anyone would know better it would be the geneticists, not the layman bloggers, don’t you?

That’s not Discover Magazine’s official blog. It says on the site, that it’s simply a news aggregator blog called 80beats. There are many discovermagazine blogs. I normally read Razib Khan’s Gene Expression blog which is also a discovermagazine blog.

From the link that 80beats took the story from:

Tishkoff cautions against reading too much into the sequence data at this early stage. “You really need to have population-level information,” she says. “If I see a variant in just one person, I don’t know how prominent it’s going to be in the rest of the population.”

So basically that claim that there’s the same amount of distance between two Bushmen than there is between a European and an Asian is inconclusive at this point. But it also states this:

To date, none of the large human genome projects has focused on minority populations.

So that would explain why the cluster maps so far have shown sub-Saharan Africans grouping together.

And I never said that geneticists are misreading SNPs. SNPs on the non-coding region are often included in population cluster comparisons. This is a fact. Looking at SNPs on the non-coding region is useful because they can show relatedness between populations. SNPs are just a change in the genome. Naturally, Africa has the most amounts of SNPs because humans have lived there far longer than anywhere else in the world and have built up more mutations. What I said, is that I consider the coding region to be more important.

I prefer to tell people to not get to snarky. The fact that you use the word persnickety illustrates your lack of testosterone! But wait, you don’t have much do you according to these theories? I guess that’s the trade off isn’t it.

I prefer to tell people to not get to snarky. The fact that you use the word persnickety illustrates your lack of testosterone! But wait, you don’t have much do you according to these theories? I guess that’s the trade off isn’t it.

I used that word because I was joking with him. And if my testosterone level is so low, then why are all up on my nuts?

The Steve Hsu piece links to a research piece from the journal Science. They are part of AAAS that you asked Sagat about. That journal produced the model for human genotype that you dismiss. I’m curious to hear your point about AAAS then.

The genotype map shows that “black people” are people with black skin who happened to be closely genetically related to other similar people whom we also call “black people”. I’m not really sure why this concept is so hard for you to grasp.

It’s funny how you automatically disregard any diseenting study or dissenting opinion. Steve Hsu being a physicist means that he at least has more credential than you. You aren’t a scientist (or don’t seem to be one). Physicists are supremely intelligent, and it is feasible that their ability to operate through the scientific method would help them formulate plausible theories or adopt plausible positions in other fields of study. And again, Steve Hsu the physicist has his opinion. You are combating it with your opinion as a…what are you? I’m not sure. You place the burden of proof on HBDers although I’m not sure why.

Steve Hsu again?? Haha, oy vey. No matter how many times you disprove something, someone always bring it back up like it’s true.

At this point in the discussion I’ll have to excuse myself because now HBDers have done jumped the shark by making pseudo-scientists into experts and astrophysicists into biologists/geneticists!

This reminds me of Samuel George Morton… and How Stephen Jay Gould whooped his butt in The Mismeasure of Man. Scientific racism is being touted as actual science, when it’s not. Facts are being touted as facts, when they are not. It’s sad to see, but thankfully very few are persuaded by HBD or even know it exists. (I didn’t know until Chuck commented once on my blog.)

I just clicked through the link to Steve Hsu’s site, which you and Zek condemned Chuck for posting, and found that it was just simply a graphic that he had taken from Razib Kahn’s Gene Expression site. And the funny thing is, this scatter chart that Steve Hsu posted was created by Razib using data from where? The same study that you posted up above.

I won’t bother re-posting my previous response to you, but if you want you can check the Sailer post. Anyway,-

Steve Hsu being a physicist means that he at least has more credential than you. You aren’t a scientist (or don’t seem to be one). Physicists are supremely intelligent, and it is feasible that their ability to operate through the scientific method would help them formulate plausible theories or adopt plausible positions in other fields of study. And again, Steve Hsu the physicist has his opinion. You are combating it with your opinion as a…what are you? I’m not sure. You place the burden of proof on HBDers although I’m not sure why.

Facepalm x Infinity.

First of all, you’ve committed at least two logical fallacies. 1. Poisoning the Well: King’s and my academic credentials have little to no impact on the evidence presented. If we are presenting facts or theories that have been tested thoroughly with predictable results, the evidence stands despite our positions/standing. 2. HBDers start of from a stand point that is in and of itself a logical fallacy; Burden of Proof or Appeal to Ignorance. While it is the belief among HBDers that snow/adverse weather conditions develop intelligence, there is little to any physical/empirical proof of this Of course you can bring up IQ tests and other systems for measuring intelligence based principally within cultural/societal norms, but you have still yet to prove your thesis/hypothesis. Where is the physical proof, the exact gene, etc. that supports your hypothesis. What HBDers have proposed in theory with far less empirical/physical backing than the Theory of Evolution and the popular understanding of the variance in the human race (or relatively lack thereof). The burden of proof, Chuck, is on the HBDers, not the rest of the scientific community who have substantial and extensive amounts of empirical/physical data to support their position.

Further, Steve Hsu is, as you just admitted, a physicist. Comparing physics to biology as though they draw from anything more than the scientific method is a flawed argument. Yes, Steve Hsu probably took some elementary to intermediate biology classes during undergrad., but that no more makes him an authority on genetics than an Earth Scientist/Geologist. I wouldn’t trust a guy with a Geology degree, even a PhD, to perform a heart transplant, would you? I mean, granted, they both had to take some chemistry and biology courses in undergrad., but somehow I’d prefer the MD over the PhD. So, more on point, why would I give any real consideration to a physicist as it concerns human evolution and genetics? He knows little to anything about that, as he specialized in physics (e.g.-he did not study for a MS or PhD in biology simultaneously, did he?).

Steve Hsu, for all his use of the scientific method, is more than likely a scientific layman when it comes to the specifics of genetics and evolution. Therefore, he’s only in a slightly better position than King to suggest theories for as to why there are “gaps” in “intelligence” levels. However, by your logic, as an anthropologist and someone who has taken a few science courses I learned to use the scientific method as well. Should I start making suggestions to NASA on how to make the next rocket/satellite/etc.?

I linked to Steve Hsu’s site which provided a model that linked to *real* genetic scientists studies which show that race is not a social construct.

I didn’t link directly to the study itself because you must buy a subscription to view it. I figured that model is pretty damning to your case so I linked to it.

But King and Zek refuse to accept that model into the body of evidence because it came from Hsu’s site. At which point I have to bring up that Hsu, being a reputable scientist, may know a little bit more about quality science than you or King or Zek. While Hsu may not be a geneticist, he at least has the scientific background to understand when science is poorly executed. He didn’t find such a problem with the model I linked to.

But the discussion really has nothing to do with Hsu because he didn’t create that model, he merely commented on it because he happens to accept the fall-out from what such a model implies. Which is why he is an HBDer.

So, please, begin by refuting the model I linked to. After seeing that model how can you argue that people don’t naturally fall into genetically distinguishable cohorts?

Wait, so now three of you are attacking Chuck by dismissing Steve Hsu, but clearly none of you even bothered to click the link, because if you did you would’ve seen that it’s nothing more than a graphic and a link to a genetic study.

Are you for real guys? There is only one race of humans on this planet, no matter what you say or do or link up or quote. I know it is depressing that those black dudes are your closest cousins biologically, but they really are. 😀

I know it is hard to be racist. I have couple neighbours who are. But they at least admit it openly and do not dance around acting like their racism is based on anything other than hating people who look different enough. Why it is so important to you that you find some kind of “scientific” explanation for your racism?

Why do you want to convince others that there are separate races of humans? And why do you try to convince black guys on this blog that for some reason they are lower than you are? That is really hilarious! 😀

But really guys, why this is so important to you that you go on for days and weeks and months with this same ole old? Looks like you are trying to convince yourselves most of all, because nobody here is convinced on your race theories which, from the biological point of view, are load of mumbo jumbo. 😀

So are you just trying to convince yourself that for some very funny reason you are better just because of your genes? How it is in real life? You guys get the chicks? You beat everybody in athletics? You all wealthy? Successfull?

I mean, you guys must be, since you are genetically superior compared to all black guys here. I bet you guys have more money and success than Will Smith ja P Diddy put together, not to mention that lazy Jay Z guy and his girl Beyoncé. I mean, that is what you guys are saying, right? You are white and genetically you are more intelligent and superior compared to any nig.. sorry, lower races, right?

So put it out sagat and chuck! Show us how much more you are succesfull than those nig.. sorry, lower spieces!

Lets see your credentials, your unbelievable succesfull careers, millions in the bank and mansions on the hill! C’mon guys! I want to see the proof that you are genetically superior to these nig… sorry, lower spieces!

Let us see your superiority in action! Open our eyes with the one undisputed fact that white men like yourselves are superior to those damned nig.. sorry, lower races!

Your lives must proove your theory beyond any theoretical debate! It is really so simple. And you, as an examples of the superior white beings, can show us the light easily by providing us those undisputable facts from your own superior succesfull lives. Right? 😀

sam: There is only one race of humans on this planet, no matter what you say or do or link up or quote. I know it is depressing that those black dudes are your closest cousins biologically, but they really are.

Chuck: No. There is only one species called “humans”. There are various sub-species or something akin to that among humans.

Sam: I know it is hard to be racist. I have couple neighbours who are.

Chuck: So then how would you know?

Sam: But they at least admit it openly and do not dance around acting like their racism is based on anything other than hating people who look different enough. Why it is so important to you that you find some kind of “scientific” explanation for your racism?

Chuck: First, I’m more interested in truth than diversity qua diversity. I’ll address it as an academic argument just for fun. Why not?

And I have absolutely no hatred for black people. The only reason I’m here today is because black man (my step grandfather) adopted my father and his siblings and brought them to America from England (he married my grandmother who had strewn my dad and his sibs into various orphanages and foster homes).

So you mislabel my stance and my intentions. I think that black people – on average – have lower innate IQ than whites. Irish people of Celtic descent have lower IQ than Irish people of East Baltic descent, but I don’t “hate” Celtic people. I just recognize them for what they are and don’t try to sugar coat it for fun or to make everyone happy. In fact, if anything, the only thing I do hate is the pressure to accept these assertions against my true beliefs. If I said this stuff out loud to even a handful of people I’d lose friends or have a brick thrown at my head.

Sam: Why do you want to convince others that there are separate races of humans? And why do you try to convince black guys on this blog that for some reason they are lower than you are? That is really hilarious!

Chuck: Abagond wrote the post, and liberal and progressive activism tacitly supports the argument that IQ is equal and they write legislation with the unreachable goal of parity in educational achievement in mind. Those are two positive statements among many that I think should be met a little bit of truth telling. And I don’t think anyone on this blog is lower than me. Both Menelik Charles and Abagond seem to have high IQ. Possibly even higher than mine.

Sam: But really guys, why this is so important to you that you go on for days and weeks and months with this same ole old? Looks like you are trying to convince yourselves most of all, because nobody here is convinced on your race theories which, from the biological point of view, are load of mumbo jumbo.

Chuck: And it looks like you are crying “uncle”. Say it louder.

Sam:So are you just trying to convince yourself that for some very funny reason you are better just because of your genes? How it is in real life? You guys get the chicks? You beat everybody in athletics? You all wealthy? Successfull?

Chuck: You’re the one who is assuming that higher IQ implies better. Yeah, some WN types and even HBDers believe that high IQ implies moral superiority, but I’ve never implied that. It is an old analogy, but I find it funny that there are so many discussions saying that race realism is racist whenever it addresses the IQ gap. Legislation must be drawn to right the ship, and many community activists are in the business of righting that ship. But there isn’t much talk about making it so that there isn’t any “discrimination” in professional sports. After all, those guys make a lot of money, and it would be really nice for those white guys who could get those jobs via government legislation. But there’s no call for that. Why?

Sam: I mean, you guys must be, since you are genetically superior compared to all black guys here. I bet you guys have more money and success than Will Smith ja P Diddy put together, not to mention that lazy Jay Z guy and his girl Beyoncé. I mean, that is what you guys are saying, right? You are white and genetically you are more intelligent and superior compared to any nig.. sorry, lower races, right?

Chuck: No, Sam. That is what you are saying. Tell me where I said any of that shit. OK then.

Of course you would pick out single examples and make a straw man argument. Standard liberal move.
But if you want to go there, start comparing Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Buffett, the Rockefellers yadda yadda yadda to the top echelon of blacks. How far down the list until you find the wealthiest black person? I believe it is Oprah and then Bob Johnson, CEO of BET. The former made her fortune off the residuals of white guilt. People flocked to her show because she wasn’t militant, but she allowed white people to feel like they were assuaging their past racist ways. Bob Johnson made his money by peddling TV content to black people. He played the race card on his own group and made billions.

So don’t compare me to Jay Z. Jay Z is blacks’ cream of the crop. I’m middle of the road – at best – for whites. Compare me to the middle of the road of blacks and compare credentials.

Sam: Lets see your credentials, your unbelievable succesfull careers, millions in the bank and mansions on the hill! C’mon guys! I want to see the proof that you are genetically superior to these nig… sorry, lower spieces!

Chuck: I don’t toss the word around, and I’ve never called anyone that. I’m not sure why you’re trying to attribute it to me. It seems like you are the one who really wants to say it.

Sam: Let us see your superiority in action! Open our eyes with the one undisputed fact that white men like yourselves are superior to those damned nig.. sorry, lower races!

Your lives must proove your theory beyond any theoretical debate! It is really so simple. And you, as an examples of the superior white beings, can show us the light easily by providing us those undisputable facts from your own superior succesfull lives. Right?

Chuck: I’ve never seen anyone more wrong, actually. You’ve constructed a naïve interpretation of mine and Sagat’s arguments. You’re asking me to look at all of this subjectively, but I’m trying to look at it objectively.
Because if I followed your taunts to their logical conclusion, if I connote high achievement with high IQ, mine and Sagat’s argument would be proven correct. Because, you see, I never said that I am the smartest person alive or smarter than every single black person. I said that white people have higher IQ. And if, as you imply, achievement is directly correlated to IQ, and since white people are obviously more successful than black people, it would follow that whites are, on average, more intelligent than blacks. You’ve proven my whole point by adopting a naïve interpretation of it. Thanks for doing my work for me.

King – Obviously you don’t know me very well, because frequent readers of my currently down blog can tell you that I’ve written extensively on the HBD issue and some of its biggest promulgators on the internet. I’ve refuted and questioned them up and down the line, and will do so again as the need and interest arises. As for my own views regarding HBD, I don’t have any problem with the fundamental premise – that human beings evolved differently based on geopgraphic location – my beef with HBDers is THEIR spin on what HBD means, and, the fact that most of them want to use their take on it to change extant public policy – which explains why I tend to focus on that side of the debate. Quite frankly, arguing over whether this scholar or that egghead is qualified or not to discuss science and the like makes my eyes glaze over and I suspect it does for the average reader out there, too. The scientific side of the issue is way too esoteric and frankly, borning, for most people to follow with any degree of interest or caring. It’s much more fun to consider the social implications of what the HBDers are proferring.

For example, Chuck Ross, a guy I know reasonably well, considers himself a HBDer much closer to that which Steve Sailer is, since his is a name that is well known in these parts. Now, he knows well my many writings on the topic of HBD, yet, he’s yet to address my public policy questions regarding them, and again, he’s known me longer than the vast majority of people here do. Nor is his avoidance of my questions unusual – just about every HBDer with whom I’ve “battled” either ignores or dodges my questions in this regard. I’ll lay them out again just in case anyone’s missed it in a seperate post coming up.

Zek – what caught my eye about your comments above was your stated support for Men’s Rights, and how you felt there was some legitimacy in the notion that White Men in particular were having a rough go of things of late historically in America. First, I’d like to ask you to please elaborate a bit on the latter? And secondly, I’m just very curious – what did you think of the Chris Brown/Rihanna affair, and how do you relate that to the actions of Mary J. Blige?

Kwama, thanks for the comments.

In closing, for now, I think it’s far more interesting to consider what the HBDers want to do with the country if they were running it. Again, it seems to me that they have some huge holes in their logic and reasoning here, to say nothing of their running up against the Constitution if their plans are to come into fruition.

OK, so let’s consider a few of the things HBDers want to see happen, although many of them are not often stated explicitly:

1. End Affirmative Action: really, what the HBDers mean here by this term, is to end any forms of preferences or quotas that pertain to Blacks, in education and hiring. The more prestigious and elite the better. The HBD argument goes, that since African Americans are on average less intelligent than Whites, it then follows that the majority of Blacks don’t really belong in the nation’s best schools and getting the cushiest of jobs because they aren’t truly qualified for them.

The problem with this argument is that it turns a blind eye to the decades, if not centuries long practice of good ole fashioned nepotism – those very same prestigious, elite schools and firms engage in blatant nepotism all the time, by seeing to it that the children of the wealthy and well-connected get in and do well. A very prominent example of this was George W. Bush, important for our discussion because the vast majority of HBDers online at least, are at the very least moderately if not stridently to the Right politically. Please note that, for example, while Steve Sailer has railed on and on about Affirmative Action over the years, he has never said anything about GWB getting over on essentially the same things that he takes issue wrt Blacks. Simply put, the HBDers are cool with preferences and quotas, so long as those receiving them are White, and by this I mean, non-Jewish White. Again, note the fact that the single biggest beneficiary of AA has been White Women – no big hew and cry from Sailer et al.

2. Speaking of the above, the next question we have to consider is that of Regression to the Mean: those of you out there of a more scientific bent will know what I mean by that term so no need for me to go rehashing it here. The problem is the HBDers never seem to want to admit that just because one has high IQ and even successfully mates with another person who is the same, thier progeny may not necessarily have the same IQ; indeed, the odds are that they won’t. The Ivy League is chockfull of mediocre kids of very smart people, who never go on to light up the sky with their supposed greatness by birth gifts. Actually, its often the reverse, its just that being among the elite brings with it the ability to cover up otherwise embarrassing factoids about yourself or those close to you. The HBDers never address this, nor do they address the fact the country has millions of Dumb White People – what are we to do wtih them? The current discussion stays mired in racial politics, partly for the reasons Chuck laidout, that there is such a thing as Leftist racial interests, but als because its an intense area of focus for the HBDers among themselves and in their own right. Even their “bible” the Bell Curve, which I’ve discussed at length at my blog, is viewed in a racial lens, when it truth a miniscule portion of the book was devoted to the topic and the authors were discussing the social implications of IQ bifurcation along class lines, primarly among WHITES. but neither side of the debate, seems to care about this little known fact about TBC. And the beat goes on.

3. Wrt the public school debate, how can we honestly say, with a straight face, that what John Ogbu discovered in his research, that the kids of prosperous and solidly middle and upper middle class Blacks consistently scored lower on tests than markedly poorer Whites and Asians, is booty? And, how can we simply turn a blind eye to the fact that school districts like Newark NJ and Washington DC are paying small fortunes to “educate” Black kids, with so little to show for it? Is it racist to merely point this out? Must we engage in diversionary debates about the Iraq War to honestly question if the monies being spent on such supposedly educational efforts are worth it? And, what of the potential evidence that what the HBDers are saying is true, that most Blacks simply aren’t as smart as most Whites or Asians – does that mean that they still shouldn’t be taught to read and write? See, I think emotionalism and deepseated partisan/ideological bias gets in the way of cleareyed questioning of the issues here. And there are, real issues, to confront.

4. Speaking of the Bell Curve, one of its “solutions” was to restrict the ability of single moms to breed on the dole. The book came out circa 1994, and in 1996, then President Bill Clinton, with the aid of a GOP led Congress, passed Welfare Reform, which made TBC’s suggestions along these lines a moot, at best, point. However, among the HBDers, this remains a hot topic – hence constant recourse to “eugenics” selective breeding that is state sponsored and/or enforced. The HBDers say that the problem is that the dumb are outbreeding the smart, and that one way to address this is to find ways to curtail the former’s ability to breed.

But aside from the facts I’ve noted above, what the HBDers never address is the fact that the Smart White People are dwindling in numbers, and they haven’t figured out how to deal with this. Some of them make passing allusions to things like “affordable family formation”, but the real deal is the fact that they haven’t figured out how to convince Smart White Women, to forego the elite university experience, the high prestige career experience, the Sex And The City experience, and be cool with popping out no less than three kids, starting around age 21 or so, with Jeremy the STEM Guy. Because even if they could get the dumb “NAMs” (Non-Asian Minority; a euphemism for Black and Brown/Hispanic people) to breed considerably less than they do, it still wouldn’t address what I’m talking about here. Simply put, there are enough Smart White People to go around. But the HBDers, for whatever reason, simply haven’t addressed this. And, put all that together with the documented fact that no state has ever been successful in getting its so-called better sections, however one may define them, into breeding MORE. They’ve been successful in getting them to breed LESS, but not MORE. No society has been able to pull this off. Not. A. Single. One. History isn’t on the HBDers side here. How do they explain this, and what is it about their plan, assuming they have one or two, that’s markedly different?

5. And I’ve addressed this A LOT on my blog – what are the downsides of being born on the right end of the bell curve? The book, the Bell Curve itself, seems only to address the left end of the curve, but they say nothing about the right end, and the reason is that it is assumed and taken almost as gospel that there IS no downside. And that I find to be fascinating in its hubris. Nature says otherwise.

For example, we know that having too high an IQ is correlated with reduced ability to socialize and empathize with others; it also goes hand in hand with reduced fertility/virilty. Hands up out there, all the ladies reading this who would like to spend their lives with John Nash or Sir Issac Newton? Brilliant Men they may have been, but by all accounts, they were really, really difficult to live with. Then, consider James Watson – his kid is schizoid. See my “regression” comments above. And those are just a few of the downsides that we know of – as any social scientist knows well, we tend to spend an inordinate mount of time and money, poking and prodding the poor and presumably dumb, but very little time doing the same to those who are deemed smart and rich.

6. Michael Levin, in his book on HBD, suggests toward the end, a stepping up of racial profiling on the part of the police, since in his view, it is proven that Blacks, particularly Black Men, have a higher propensity towards violence and violent crime than anyone else in society. Of course this brings up questions of violations of civil liberties. How do the HBDers square these seemingly two irreconcilable notions? Whether we like it or not, its one thing for a cabbie in Big City America to pass on picking up Black Men regardless of age or attire or even time of day for fear of even a sizable minority of them being known for sticking up and even murdering cabbies; its another to have such a view as a matter of public policy and enforced by the police. HBDers don’t explicitly state whether they’re in favor of such measures outside of Levin, nor have they expressed their views with how they can justify it under current American law and customs.

These are just a few of the many questions I have for the HBDers, that always seem to get lost in the shuffle, due to hyperbole and emotionalism on both sides of the aisle, along with arid and boring to tears esoteric discussions over arguing whether this or that is science or not, or whether this or that source is authentic enough, and so forth. We never really drill down to the nuts and bolts, rubber hits the road hard questions that need to be asked of the HBDers, and I think they kind of like that, because they never have to actually put their ideas out there on the line to be scrutinized; they can always claim ideological martyr status for being shouted down as being iconoclasts in the public square, by left leaning blank slatists who are little more than intellectual frauds. I say, let’s have the debate on HBD, on what it would actually mean in public policy terms. Let’s see how the HBDers intend to address the problems of our time, and indeed things they see as problems. So long as we continue to quibble over how many angles can dance on the head of a pin, we’ll never get to those very important questions.

Hopefully, this comment(s) by me will get the conversation – a truly meaningful one in my view – moving in the right direction.

as for me (and I think Sailer), i just want to eradicate the egalitarian goals and ideals that we the people use to gauge black achievement. the achievement gap is *partly* a function of lower IQ. throwing money after educational achievement for blacks continues to prove ineffective.

And I was about to write something about your right to your opinion and why people should not try and stifle opinions different to theirs.

You can freely hold your opinions about white people being superior to brown/black people. We all have given our reasons for disagreeing with you, and I particularly liked Olufemi’s post and KM’s link about self-educated black inventors. But no, you want the govt to stop spending in education for blacks. I don’t know whether Abagond will allow this comment to appear, but you’re incredibly racist and bigotted. Have you even noticed the flaws with your argument? Even if for the sake of the argument I assume that blacks are less intelligent than whites, you yourself have admitted that there are black people who fit your definition of ‘intelligent’. So in your dream society, those blacks too will not get equal opportunities while dumb and mediocre white people will enjoy their right to education just because they’re white. That’s fair to you?
And did it happen to cross your mind that by the same logic(?) of yours, the US of A should stop wasting money after educational achievement for whites because Asians prove to be better achievers?

Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.

The article goes on to say…

…Recent revelations that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical has proved that race has almost no biological validity. Yet geneticists’ claims that race is a phony construct have not rung true to many nonscientists — and understandably so, said Vivian Ota Wang of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda.

“You may tell people that race isn’t real and doesn’t matter, but they can’t catch a cab,” Ota Wang said. “So unless we take that into account it makes us sound crazy.”

Maybe, perhaps its time as Obsidian suggests:

“… let’s have the debate on HBD, on what it would actually mean in public policy terms. Let’s see how the HBDers intend to address the problems of our time, and indeed things they see as problems…”

I tend to agree.

Why not give up the biological deterministic argument about Race and Intelligence. The scientific evidence is not in your favor. The Political one could be if you can make a strong . And at least it would be a more HONEST approach.

From the few posts of yours that I’ve read in this thread, I’ve gathered that you’re fairly intelligent, but I also have seen that the issue of human differences is something you have little interest in, which is understandable since, as Obsidian noted, it is an esoteric school of thought. I was going to respond to the article that you posted, but honestly, I think it would just lead to butting heads. If you don’t accept the things that I say, then that’s the way that it is. There’s no reason to argue about it.

I just want you to know that this is a subject that I’ve studied for many years and I spend a lot of time reading and digesting different genetic, forensic and anthropology papers. I also read opposing views to try to get a fuller perspective. I only write what I feel is the truth and my point of views aren’t based on some flimsy understanding of science as many seem to suggest. I realize that I take a minority position; I can accept that.

And did it happen to cross your mind that by the same logic(?) of yours, the US of A should stop wasting money after educational achievement for whites because Asians prove to be better achievers?

And where are the calls for spending on white students to come up to par with Asian students? As far as I know, money isn’t demarcated in that way although one constantly hears about efforts to throw good money after black education.

@chuckie: oh man, you really need to get out more often! Celtic irish?? Are you really that dumb?? You do know that there is no race called Celts? If you don’t know that then, boy, you gotta didimau to the history class.

There was cultural sphere which was named celtic much later on. So-called celts did not see themselves as one race nor one people. The whole “race” of “Celts” was invented centuries later. You are truly funny guy, man! 😀

i’ve debated on the internet long enough to know that if someone nit picks one tiny point of a long comment that means they realize they are defeated. there are ethnic differences between groups in ireland. there are celts, eastern baltics, nordic alpines, dinarics, etc. they have differentiating features and abilities.

There’s a hilarious sort of ironic recursiveness in watching obviously very intelligent people debate the existence of the measurability of intelligence with obviously very much less intelligent people.

Intellectual superiority from the north is a myth. Take a look at modern medicine, it is still unable to create one medication that has no side effect. Take this pill, but be cautious you may go blind, or paralyzed, this is our current state of medicine. Doctors cannot cure any illness, they can only treat symptoms. The vehicles we drive, pollute the earth. The chlorine in our water is a carcinogen. The food we eat is laden with chemicals. My favourite invention from the north, lets get the roadkill, and left over meat from the kill floor, grind it up and feed it to herbivorous animals, then let us slaughter those animals and feed it back to humans…yep our modern day agri-scientists approved this.

We are being led to believe that more technology is a reflection of our growing intelligence. But be careful, using that cellphone too much may cause brain cancer and don’t put the laptop on your lap, it may kill your sperm..then why the heck is it called a laptop? The state of intelligence if there is any left in the north is glaringly dismal. Yet, the very ppl who are deemed less intelligent seem to be the smart ones among us.

yet people from these modern societies live much longer and healthier lives than most others.

western technology developed vaccinations against many diseases that killed millions of people. yes, many modern drugs have bad side effects. but you only look at the negatives. how about penicillin? the vaccine against polio? treatments for malaria and HIV?

I suppose what surprises me most is, for someone of your supposed intellect, education and scholarship, you would be content to fixate on one aspect of human difference in isolation to everything else?

Its not that I am not interested or have difficulty in acknowledging such differences between peoples. On the contrary I am all for celebrating our unique human diversity in all its vast manifestations. – Something your own Blog site claims to do..!!!

So at least I can see your “hearts” in the right place. The problem you experience, in my view, stems from your ingrained beliefs. But, of course, as posts from people like Chuck and others show: you are not alone…!!!

By all means comment on or challenge that Washington Post article (thats why I put it up in the first place!)

Its meant to challenge or initiate questioning of those ingrained beliefs. Just as this very subject and Blog (Abagands) we’re taking part in.

Let me attempt to offer you a analogy of how I see our respective positions:

We live on a planet we call Earth or Terra (dependent on who you listen to). On this many, many human challenges have taken place; wars, famine, glorious achievements, civilizations ancient and new, cultures, explorations etc.. etc…etc add to the list…

But we are also part of a solar system which has formed around our Sun – often referred to as “Sol”

And it doesn’t stop there… We are also part of a Galaxy we call the “Milky Way” and that in turn is part of a wider star system or constellation…and it goes on and on..incorporating vast Universes…

Now I am not telling you anything you don’t already know here. Thats not my point. My point is one of “context and perspective”

Your pre-occupation with what you truly believe are meaningful differences can be contrasted with the challenges we, as humans, have faced and continue to face on this planet.

Not saying they’re not important? Of course they are!!! And time and effort needs to be devoted to dealing and tackling them. But lets also remember and try to keep things in perspective here.

The Solar system, Star Constellation, Universe represents that 99.9% identifiability of “sameness” amongst human beings. This presents a far bigger and greater perspective to take into account.

I am I saying they’re more important? Well in the context of the bigger picture. Of course they are!!! And time and effort needs to be devoted to recognizing, accepting and acknowledging this.

But lets remember this is not an “either” “Or” argument.
The “Big” or the “little” picture. Its an argument for both because they are both equally important and valid perspectives to have. Again it about applying the right context and perspective here.

Problems can and do arise when you focus exclusively and loose sight of one perspective over the other. Those ingrained beliefs I keep referring to can reek havoc when left unchecked.!!!

So Sagat this is presented to you not to convince you of the fallacy of your ways but simply to offer an alternative point of view and understanding of how we see the same world we believe we perceive.

As an added illustration look at the world view in this post contrasted with the world view in the other. Tell me which for you has the bigger world picture?

Mabel

Intellectual superiority from the north is a myth. Take a look at modern medicine, it is still unable to create one medication that has no side effect. Take this pill, but be cautious you may go blind, or paralyzed, this is our current state of medicine. Doctors cannot cure any illness, they can only treat symptoms. The vehicles we drive, pollute the earth. The chlorine in our water is a carcinogen. The food we eat is laden with chemicals. My favourite invention from the north, lets get the roadkill, and left over meat from the kill floor, grind it up and feed it to herbivorous animals, then let us slaughter those animals and feed it back to humans…yep our modern day agri-scientists approved this.

We are being led to believe that more technology is a reflection of our growing intelligence. But be careful, using that cellphone too much may cause brain cancer and don’t put the laptop on your lap, it may kill your sperm..then why the heck is it called a laptop? The state of intelligence if there is any left in the north is glaringly dismal. Yet, the very ppl who are deemed less intelligent seem to be the smart ones among us.

and this…

Chuck

Mabel:

yet people from these modern societies live much longer and healthier lives than most others.

western technology developed vaccinations against many diseases that killed millions of people. yes, many modern drugs have bad side effects. but you only look at the negatives. how about penicillin? the vaccine against polio? treatments for malaria and HIV?

the thing that works every time is the lack of brevity of your comments. plus, you and i have been down this road before. we don’t have to bring our show to Abagond. when’s your blog coming back? what’s the hold up?

“Couldn’t the same be said about the tropics? Afterall there is higher instances of viruses and microorganisms that can kill off the weak, plantlife that is poisonous, large game ect.”

Disease burden does play a part in the IQ of nations. Nations with high disease burdens tend to have lower IQ’s those with fewer infectious diseases. One of the reasons that the Africans were enslaved in the America’s and other places was that the higher disease burden in Africa made them immune–or atleast more adept at dealing with–European diseases than the native Americans. Physically, Africans were “hardier” than the Europeans who conquered them. I once read a quote that the life expectancy for a European who went to Africa was less than a year (this was before colonialism).

No more comments? Common – the debate is far from over. No one has succeeded in convincing anyone else of their views. It was reading fun though – well most of it.

Chuck…where do I start? You seem to think that Africa is one tiny location. Well, it’s not. According to the current evolutionary theory, the Out of Africa migration has been surmised to be from East Africa, very close to the horn. So people…well the early homo sapiens migrated to Asia, Europe and guess what? Other parts of Africa. *gasp!* Are you following me so far. You know – West Africa, Southen Africa…and the last time I check savannah and near desert conditions are very different environments from dense tropical jungles. Woah! They must have needed a major change in hunting techniques. So that essentially throws your migration theory out the window because, again just so you u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d there was migration within Africa in the early days to places with very different environments.

Moving on – Sagat. Unlike Chuck, you didn’t merely regurgitate your theories. Chuck did even after people pointed out incongruencies like…Why did the more recently evolved, newly migrating Homo Sapiens outbreed the European inhabiting nearnderthals if by virtue of the cold climate, the nearnderthals would have been smarter. You still haven’t answered that Chuck.

Okay, back to Sagat: Your query on the differences among the races and the example of a randomly drawn sample…. No one responded satisfactorily to that, as yet, so I will. And yes, I believe that there are differences among humans, but you see, those differences are among an INDIVIDUAL vein. Because one family, one nuclear family can have a son who’s a cop and another who’s a crook. One family, one nuclear family can have a son whose extremely smart and another who’s a high school dropout. So, let’s take a large family sample, then; men only for illustrative purposes – brothers, nephews, uncles, fathers, and split them into two groups, then compare the two:

You might get a mean height that is statistically different (Uncle Zuok in group B might have been really really tall), a mean weight that is statistically different (Father Wot in group A might have been really really heavy), and a mean difference in IQ (Son XYZ might have been autistic). Do the same experiment, but regroup the large family as one and compare them with a randomly selected but similarly sized family from West Africa (Family B who you’ve also performed the same experiment on). By the way, Family A was Finish. And let’s say that you once again get statistically different means. What would be your conclusion? Here is how it might look:

1) Family A has a higher average height than Family B, but Group A from Family B has a higher average height than Group B from Family A etc etc etc.

A discussion you had with someone earlier has already alluded to this….diversity and shifting lines. Let’s use simple skin color. You can say that Africans are the darkest group of humans. YET you can find darker groups in India than in some parts of Africa. You can say Europeans are the lightest groups of humans. Yet thera are people in parts of Asia that are lighter than Spaniards and Italians. THAT is the danger of generalizing. it’s the same with IQ assuming the tests are given properly without bias. As someone pointed out – putting a nation at an IQ of 70 is ludicrous from a rational point of view since that borders mental retardation – such a nation should not have a single university of higher education. Can you name ONE nation that lacks a university? And Nigeria has a mean IQ of 67? Well, I must be a genius then! Oh wait, no…high school results showed that while I’m really smart, I’m no genius. So to hell with those results. My experience tells me otherwise, and I have lived in a LOT of places.

Overall, to discuss your difference hypothesis, you will need to group people not as races but as different ethnicities. And since one country like Nigeria has over 250 ethnic groups…well, good luck with that. And if you’d like to think that those in West Africa, for example, are more homogeneous and can be grouped as one, think again. Even within Nigeria, if you know what to look for you can discern slight differences in physical appearance and correctly guess what ethnic group certain people identify with (who knows how different their IQs might be. After all apparently minor differences in physical appearance might mean huge differences in intelligence. Who knows? You haven’t done the study yet). And that’s just one country. So good luck with that!

One of many websites that have people take their online IQ test and then ranks results by name and country. And take a look at the random distribution of said countries – no Asian countries in the top 10 though – the language barrier maybe? Wow – how different from the test results in that stupid book who stupid people eat up (Hey have the right to call people stupid! I’m smart, remember!)

So if we assume that the people who take this test are in the middle class – hey they can afford to spend valuable time taking an IQ test online – and are therefore likely to be educated. That the fact that they are taking a random IQ test shows that they’re engaged….interesting results start to emerge….after all, the website isn’t trying to prove a point, is it? It’s just having people take tests and ranking them statistically.

Mr Green, I questioned your “efficiency” description, because in the very cold weather in cities, it’s not unusual to hear a news story now and again about the poorest of old people who cannot afford adequate, dying from hypothermia.

When it’s very cold brain function can be affected in negative ways,

Apparently, old people in those situations (or anyone in those conditions) become mentally confused and slur their words. When they fall asleep, they die.

Perhaps it is not the snow but adapting to the 25 different environment changes. Going up a mountain in Africa only takes a few generations and so there is only one environment change. Therefore, very little change in I.Q.

However, going north out of Africa averaging 10 miles per generation means moving 200 miles north and a new and different environment with different plants, terrain, animals, and weather every twenty generations. Twenty generations is sufficient for a small genetic change including perhaps a tiny change in I.Q. After 10,000 years people have adapted to 25 different environment with perhaps up to a half point I.Q. increase on average with each change of environment.

Native Americans had to go through more climate zones than anyone else, way more than whites. Not just because they travelled farthest, but also because the Americas run north to south and so have more changes in climate.

I didn’t wish to imply that distance traveled or number of environment changes vs. IQ change is a constant. Nevertheless, you point about the Americas does in my mind invalidate it. Nevertheless, it may have some effect just as cold weather (snow) may have a greater contribution factor on I.Q. changes, than warm weather.

I do believe that when groups are separated, they continue to evolve and over time have greater differences. I also believe that each group, separated from the others, will evolve to better adapt to their specific environments. Random mutations will account for some change in I.Q., just as they account for other changes such as length of nose and body shape.

Therefore, I.Q. difference may mostly be random. And/or in certain environments, in order to adapt, selection for greater I.Q. may be of greater necessity than other environments. However, those broad generalities don’t identify the specific reasons which I should probably leave to other that are far more intelligent than I.

dwornock if you had ANY idea of how slow evolution really works (not adaptation mind you!) then you would realize that there has been nowhere near the requisite time needed for ANY significant evolutionary changes to occur between homo sapiens populations.